Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China Evergrande Group — once the country's largest real estate developer — was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday by a court in Shenzhen, southern China, marking a dramatic legal conclusion to one of the most consequential corporate collapses in modern economic history. The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in Guangdong province also ordered the confiscation of all of Hui's personal assets and revoked his political rights for life. The court fined Evergrande and its real estate affiliate a combined 15.82 billion yuan (approximately $2.4 billion) for crimes including large-scale financial fraud, falsifying financial records, and concealing debt.
Hui, also known by his Mandarin name Xu Jiayin, had pleaded guilty in April to multiple charges, including embezzlement and corporate bribery. The court found that between 2016 and 2021, Hui and Evergrande engaged in continuous, large-scale financial fraud — inflating assets and concealing liabilities — and used bribery to gain control of financial institutions. Several other senior executives were also sentenced, including Hui's two sons, with prison terms ranging from 22 months to 18 years. Five other senior Evergrande figures received sentences of between six and 18 years.
Hui rose from humble origins in rural China to build Evergrande into a property behemoth, founding the company in 1996 and riding a decades-long real estate boom fuelled by aggressive borrowing. At its peak, Evergrande carried a stock market valuation exceeding $50 billion, and Hui was once ranked Asia's wealthiest individual. The firm's downfall began when Beijing introduced debt-curbing measures in 2020 to cool speculation in the property sector. Struggling to meet repayments, Evergrande sold properties at steep discounts before officially defaulting in 2021. The court also heard that pre-sale funds collected from prospective homebuyers were diverted away from construction, leaving hundreds of projects unfinished.
The collapse of Evergrande sent shockwaves through China's broader property market, which at its height accounted for roughly a third of the country's gross domestic product and was a critical revenue source for local governments. Several other major developers followed with their own financial crises, and the sector's prolonged difficulties have continued to weigh on the world's second-largest economy. In March 2024, Hui was separately fined $6.5 million and permanently banned from China's capital markets after his company was found to have overstated its revenue by $78 billion. Evergrande's shares, which had lost 99% of their value, were removed from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2025.
The life sentence is widely seen as a signal from Beijing that it will hold individual executives accountable for systemic risks to the financial system. The scale of the fraud, the number of ordinary homebuyers left with undelivered properties, and the broader economic damage caused by Evergrande's implosion had made the case a defining episode of China's property crisis — one whose consequences continue to reverberate across the Chinese economy.