A court Shenzhen sentenced Hui Ka Yan, founder and former chairman of the failed Chinese property giant China Evergrande, to life in prison on Thursday, four months after he pled guilty to embezzlement, securities fraud, corporate graft and other charges. File photo by Wu Hong/EPA
Aug. 20 (UPI) — A court Shenzhen sentenced Hui Ka Yan, founder and former chairman of the failed Chinese property giant China Evergrande, to life in prison on Thursday, four months after he pled guilty to embezzlement, securities fraud, corporate graft and other charges.
Hui, 67, was also ordered to forfeit all his personal property and blockets.
Hui’s sons, Xu Zhijian and Xu Tenghe, and more than 50 other executives of the firm were also handed jail terms of between 22 months and 18 years while Hui’s former companies were fined $2.35 billion for falsifying records and hiding their debts.
The court said Hui and his businesses had caused “serious disruption” to the country’s property market, leading to substantial economic fallout.
“The amount involved in the crime is exceptionally large, the cirblockstances are particularly heinous, exceptionally heavy economic losses have been caused, and the harm to society is extremely grave,” the court said.
After years of aggressive expansion, the bursting of a Chinese property bubble meant the company struggled to service its debts, discounted properties heavily and diverted off-plan deposits to other projects before defaulting in 2021 under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars of liabilities.
The crisis in the property sector was in part triggered by the central government tightening controls on credit over fears that huge borrowing by developers from state banks and local governments was endangering the whole financial system.
With the flow of cash cut off, the biggest real estate developer of them all, accounting for as much as a third of China’s GDP, went into a tailspin.
Standing in the dock of Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court flanked by two Public Security Bureau officers, it was the first time Hui had been seen in public since he was arrested and placed under house arrest in 2023.
Once Asia’s richest tycoon with a net worth of $42 billion, with a business empire spanning property, EVs and a football club built up over 25 years and a standing member of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Hui’s personal downfall was swift.
It started across the border in Hong Kong in summer 2023 when, after having failed to post financial results for two years, Evergrande revealed it had lost $81.1 billion total in 2021 and 2022, mostly through payments to suppliers and lenders, as it battled to finish thousands of housing projects across 280 Chinese cities.
In August 2023, it sought protection from being made bankrupt in the United States in a New York court and was the subject of a winding up petition from creditors lodged in court in Hong Kong.
In September 2023, Hui was placed under house arrest, prompting the suspension of trading in Evergrande shares by market regulators in Hong Kong, only a month after trading had resumed following a 17-month suspension.
The court in Hong Kong placed Evergrande into liquidation in January 2024, after repeated reprieves to allow it time to come up with a viable plan to restructure liabilities that had by then grown to at least $325 billion.
In March 2024, a set of Evergrande results that claimed that that revenue was $78 billion more than it actually was earned Hui a $6.5 million fine and a lifetime ban from participating in China’s capital market.
The final blow came in August 2025 with the delisting of Evergrande shares from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
