China Evergrande Group founder Hui Ka Yan has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Chinese court after pleading guilty to a series of financial crimes linked to the spectacular collapse of the once-dominant property developer.
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The Shenzhen court handed down the sentence on Thursday, five years after Evergrande’s debt crisis sent shockwaves through China’s property sector and wider financial markets.
Hui, 67, who was once ranked as Asia’s richest man, 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 said offences involving Hui, Evergrande and its main subsidiary, Hengda Real Estate, concerned “particularly huge amounts” of money and resulted in significant economic losses and serious social harm.
Apart from the life sentence, the court ordered the confiscation of Hui’s personal assets.
Evergrande was also fined 8.82 billion yuan, equivalent to about $1.31 billion, while Hengda Real Estate was fined 7 billion yuan.
Five other senior Evergrande executives received prison sentences ranging from six to 18 years.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that a total of 56 people connected with the company, excluding Hui, were sentenced on Thursday.
Evergrande was once China’s largest property developer by contracted sales, but its aggressive expansion was heavily financed by debt.
The company eventually defaulted on most of its approximately $300 billion in liabilities, triggering one of the most serious corporate collapses in China’s history.
Its failure became emblematic of the country’s prolonged property crisis, which has weighed heavily on economic growth, household confidence and financial markets.
Evergrande’s inability to repay billions of dollars invested in its wealth-management products also sparked protests by ordinary investors, many of whom lost substantial portions of their savings.
Hui founded Evergrande in 1996 after growing up in a rural village in central China.
Through an aggressive expansion strategy, he transformed the company into one of China’s most powerful property groups.
At the height of his wealth in 2017, Forbes estimated his net worth at $45.3 billion, making him Asia’s richest person at the time.
However, Evergrande’s debt-driven expansion ultimately became unsustainable as Beijing tightened controls on highly leveraged property developers and the company struggled to meet its financial obligations.
A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande into liquidation in 2024, while the company was subsequently delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Despite Hui’s conviction and life sentence, creditors are still facing a lengthy battle to recover money from the collapsed property group.
As of August last year, Evergrande’s liquidators had reportedly sold only about $255 million worth of assets, compared with creditor claims estimated at around $45 billion.
The liquidators are also pursuing Hui and his former spouse through overseas legal proceedings in an effort to recover about $6 billion in dividends and remuneration allegedly paid to Hui and other former executives.
Hui had already faced regulatory sanctions before Thursday’s sentencing.
In 2024, China’s securities regulator fined him about $6.6 million and permanently barred him from participating in the country’s securities market after finding that Evergrande’s flagship unit had inflated earnings and committed securities fraud.
Thursday’s life sentence represents the most severe legal consequence yet for the founder of Evergrande, whose dramatic rise from rural poverty to billionaire status and subsequent fall alongside one of the world’s most indebted property companies has come to symbolise the excesses and fallout of China’s decades-long property boom.
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