Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court on Thursday sentenced Evergrande Group founder Hui Ka Yan to life imprisonment and ordered the confiscation of all his personal property, nearly five years after the developer’s collapse triggered a prolonged crisis in China’s property sector.
Hui, 67, also known as Xu Jiayin, pleaded guilty in April to eight charges, including misuse of funds, fundraising fraud, illegally taking public deposits, illegally extending loans, fraudulent issuance of securities and bribery. The court found that Hui and Evergrande had committed serious financial offences involving particularly large sums, causing significant economic losses and serious social harm.
Evergrande Group was fined 8.82 billion yuan (about $1.31 billion). Its main mainland subsidiary, Evergrande Real Estate Group (Hengda), received an additional fine of 7 billion yuan. The combined penalties total 15.82 billion yuan, or roughly $2.3 billion. Five other senior executives received prison terms ranging from six to 18 years. In total, 56 people linked to the company were sentenced, according to reports citing state media.
Investigators determined that Evergrande engaged in large-scale financial fraud, including inflating assets and concealing liabilities. The company overstated revenue by approximately $80 billion in 2019 and 2020 through the premature recognition of property sales. Before defaulting on its debts in 2021, Evergrande had accumulated more than $300 billion in liabilities, making it one of China’s largest corporate failures and a symbol of the country’s extended property downturn.
The collapse inflicted substantial losses on homeowners, investors and creditors. Problems surrounding wealth-management products led to protests by people who said they had lost their savings. A Hong Kong court ordered the company into liquidation in January 2024 after it failed to present a viable restructuring plan. Its Hong Kong-listed shares were later delisted. Recovery efforts have progressed slowly; Reuters reported that only about $255 million had been recovered against claims of roughly $45 billion.
Hui founded Evergrande in the 1990s and built it into one of China’s largest property developers through aggressive, debt-fuelled expansion. At the peak of his wealth in 2017, Forbes estimated his fortune at $45.3 billion. That fortune evaporated as the company’s problems mounted.
The life sentence follows a 2024 regulatory action in which China’s securities regulator fined Hui and imposed a lifetime ban from the securities market after finding that Evergrande had inflated revenue and committed securities violations.
The ruling marks a sharp fall for a once-dominant figure in China’s property boom, while creditors continue efforts to recover funds lost in one of the country’s most significant corporate collapses.
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