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The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court handed down the life sentence to Hui Ka Yan, also known as Xu Jiayin, along with the confiscation of all his personal property after he admitted to embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery during proceedings that began with a guilty plea in April. The court additionally fined Evergrande Group 8.82 billion yuan and its real estate unit 7 billion yuan, according to state media reports relayed by the BBC. Prosecutors had presented evidence that the company diverted millions of dollars in pre-sale homebuyer funds away from construction toward new projects, leaving hundreds of developments unfinished.
Hui expressed remorse during the April hearings, a point noted across multiple outlets covering the trial including Reuters and the Guardian. The sentencing follows his 2023 detention and a 2024 regulatory fine of $6.5 million plus a lifetime ban from China’s securities markets for overstating revenue by $78 billion, as detailed in a BBC report from that period. Legal observers cited by Reuters had anticipated severe penalties given the scale of alleged misconduct and its widespread impact on investors and buyers.
Once Asia’s richest person with a fortune built on aggressive debt-financed expansion, Hui founded Evergrande in 1996 and grew it into China’s largest property developer with a peak stock market valuation exceeding $50 billion. The entrepreneur rose from rural poverty, raised by his grandmother, before entering real estate and leveraging borrowed funds to fuel rapid growth across thousands of projects. His personal trajectory mirrored the boom in China’s housing market before regulatory tightening altered the landscape.
Evergrande defaulted on the bulk of its roughly $300 billion in liabilities in 2021 after Beijing introduced the three red lines policy in 2020 to curb excessive borrowing in the sector, Reuters reported. A Council on Foreign Relations assessment placed the developer’s total liabilities above $335 billion in 2022, equivalent to about 1.8 percent of China’s GDP that year and more than ten times its annual revenue. The firm ultimately filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States and saw its Hong Kong shares delisted in August 2025 after a 99 percent drop in valuation.
The company’s implosion accelerated a broader slump in China’s property market, where sales have fallen 54 percent since 2021 and investment in real estate dropped 9.6 percent in subsequent years, according to U.S. congressional research. Property activity constitutes nearly 30 percent of the Chinese economy, leaving local governments, banks and millions of homebuyers exposed to the fallout as unfinished apartments proliferated. Over 50 other developers have since defaulted, compounding pressures on an economy already facing slowing growth.
Fitch Ratings and other analysts traced the crisis to years of overbuilding and reliance on pre-sales, with Evergrande alone linked to more than 1.6 million undelivered homes at its peak. A Wikipedia compilation of developments drawing on industry data noted total liabilities across Chinese developers reaching trillions of yuan, equivalent to a third of national GDP. The sector’s contraction has weighed on household wealth, local government revenues from land sales and overall fixed-asset investment.
In response to the mounting crisis, authorities have pursued both corporate restructuring and individual accountability, with Hui’s case serving as a prominent example. The liquidation order issued for Evergrande in 2024 by a Hong Kong court underscored the failure to reach a viable debt restructuring agreement despite prolonged negotiations. Industry tallies continue to reflect constrained recovery, as the combination of regulatory tightening and eroded confidence keeps new construction and sales subdued across China’s urban centers.
