Evergrande founder handed life sentence as court seizes his assets

The founder of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant whose collapse triggered a nationwide housing market crisis, has been sentenced to life in prison and stripped of all personal property.

Hui Ka Yan pleaded guilty in April to multiple charges, including embezzling assets and corporate bribery. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court also imposed fines totaling 15.82 billion yuan, roughly £1.73 billion or $2.35 billion, on his former companies over a range of offenses that included falsifying financial records and concealing debt.

The sentencing marks a major turning point in the fallout from Evergrande’s collapse, which shook China’s property sector and inflicted heavy losses on investors and domestic banks alike. The court said Hui and his businesses seriously disrupted the Chinese property market, causing significant economic damage. Other former Evergrande executives, including Hui’s two sons Xu Zhijian and Xu Tenghe, received jail terms ranging from 22 months to 18 years, according to Chinese state media.

Once ranked as Asia’s richest man, Hui has watched his fortune and influence collapse alongside his company. Also known as Xu Jiayin, he grew up in rural China raised by his grandmother before entering the property industry and founding Evergrande in 1996. He guided the company through a period of rapid expansion fueled by heavy borrowing, eventually building Evergrande into China’s largest real estate developer with a stock market valuation exceeding $50 billion, roughly £36.7 billion. At his peak, Hui held the distinction of being Asia’s wealthiest individual.

The company suffered a major setback when Beijing introduced new measures in 2020 aimed at curbing debt across the property sector. As Evergrande struggled to keep up with interest payments, it began selling properties at steep discounts to stay afloat before ultimately collapsing in 2021. Court proceedings in April revealed that the company had taken in millions of dollars in pre sale funds from prospective homebuyers that were never used for the construction they were intended to finance. Instead, that money was redirected toward new development projects, leaving hundreds of housing projects unfinished.

In March 2024, Hui was separately fined $6.5 million and banned for life from China’s capital markets after regulators found the company had overstated its revenue by $78 billion.

Evergrande’s stock market value shrank by 99 percent before the company’s shares were delisted from the Hong Kong exchange in August 2025, ending more than fifteen years of trading. The company’s implosion is widely seen as a key trigger for the broader downturn in China’s property market that continues to weigh on the country’s economy. At its peak, Evergrande stood as the largest firm in an industry that accounted for roughly a third of China’s gross domestic product, serving as both a major driver of economic growth and a critical revenue source for local governments. The sector’s ongoing troubles have continued to pressure the world’s second largest economy, with several other major developers facing their own financial distress in the years since Evergrande’s fall.