Evergrande Founder Hui Ka Yan Sentenced to Life in Prison as China’s Property Crisis Deepens

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Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China Evergrande Group and once Asia’s richest man, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday by a court in Shenzhen after pleading guilty to large-scale financial crimes, a dramatic fall for the businessman whose company’s collapse became one of the defining episodes of China’s prolonged property crisis.

The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court also ordered the confiscation of all of Hui’s personal property. Hui, also known as Xu Jiayin, had pleaded guilty in April to multiple charges, including fraud, illegal absorption of public deposits, misuse of funds, illegally extending loans, fraudulent securities issuance and corporate bribery.

The court said the criminal acts of Hui, Evergrande and its main property subsidiary, Hengda Real Estate, involved “particularly huge amounts and egregious circumstances,” caused particularly significant economic losses and caused particularly serious social harm, and “should be severely punished according to law.”

The court fined Evergrande Group 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion) and Hengda Real Estate 7 billion yuan ($1.04 billion). Five other senior Evergrande executives received prison terms ranging from six to 18 years. State broadcaster CCTV reported that 56 people linked to the company, excluding Hui, were sentenced on Thursday.

The case brings a major legal reckoning for a company that had accumulated more than $300 billion in liabilities and defaulted on most of them. Evergrande’s collapse, which accelerated after Chinese authorities began cracking down on excessive borrowing by property developers in 2020, helped tip the wider real estate sector into crisis and has continued to weigh on the world’s second-largest economy.

For ordinary investors, the consequences were deeply personal. Evergrande’s failure to repay billions of dollars in wealth-management products triggered protests after savers, including many lower-income households, saw their holdings wiped out. Social media comments by Evergrande homeowners reflected that anger on Thursday.

“All ordinary citizens have paid the cost,” one wrote. Another said: “Imprisonment is meant to protect him. If he comes out, his life is in jeopardy.” A third asked simply: “What about our money?”

The life sentence is unlikely to resolve the larger financial fallout. A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande into liquidation in 2024, and the company was later delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The liquidation has moved slowly: liquidators have sold only about $255 million worth of assets as of last August, compared with creditors’ claims totalling $45 billion. Evergrande’s liquidators declined to comment on Hui’s sentence.

Outside mainland China, liquidators are also pursuing offshore assets belonging to Hui and his former spouse, seeking to claw back $6 billion in dividends and remuneration paid to the founder and other former executives.

Hui’s rise had mirrored the extraordinary expansion of China’s property market. A former steel technician raised by his grandmother in a rural village in central Henan province, Hui founded Evergrande in 1996 and built it into China’s biggest property developer through aggressive expansion and heavy borrowing. By 2017, Forbes estimated his fortune at $45.3 billion, making him Asia’s richest person at the time.

His downfall accelerated after Evergrande defaulted on its debts and Chinese authorities detained him in 2023. He has not been seen publicly since. In 2024, China’s securities regulator fined Hui $6.6 million and barred him from the securities market for life after finding that Evergrande’s flagship unit had inflated earnings and committed securities fraud.

The sentencing closes one chapter of Evergrande’s extraordinary rise and collapse, but the financial consequences remain far from settled. The slow liquidation, tens of billions of dollars in creditor claims and the broader damage from China’s property downturn leave the company’s collapse as a continuing burden for investors, homeowners and the wider Chinese economy.