A Chinese court has handed China Evergrande Group (恒大集團) founder Hui Ka-yan (許家印) a life sentence, stripped him of his political rights for life and ordered the seizure of his entire personal fortune, closing out a years-long fraud and bribery case that has become a symbol of the reckoning facing China's debt-laden property sector.
The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in Guangdong province delivered the first-instance ruling on Thursday, according to a report by state broadcaster CCTV. Alongside Hui's sentence, the court fined China Evergrande Group 8.82 billion yuan (roughly $1.2 billion) and its flagship subsidiary, Evergrande Real Estate Group, a further 7 billion yuan. Judges also ordered the continued recovery of any illegally obtained gains, directing that defendants personally cover any shortfall, and specified that repaying victims takes legal priority over collecting fines or seized assets.
A Decade Of Financial Deception
According to the court's findings, Evergrande Group, its property arm and Hui Ka-yan engaged in sustained, large-scale accounting fraud between 2016 and 2021, inflating the company's assets and hiding its liabilities from investors and regulators. Prosecutors said this scheme underpinned a string of offenses, including illegally soliciting deposits from the public, fund-raising fraud, fraudulent securities issuance and failing to disclose material information as required by law.
Bribery, Illegal Loans, And Insider Control
Investigators further found that Evergrande and Hui used bribery to gain effective control over financial institutions, then diverted credit and insurance funds from those institutions to prop up the group's operations, conduct the court classified as corporate bribery, unlawful lending and illegal use of funds. Separately, prosecutors said Hui exploited his position as chairman of Evergrande Real Estate to direct the falsification of financial records and to siphon company assets to himself under the guise of dividend payments, a scheme the court determined amounted to occupational embezzlement.
Taken together, the court convicted Evergrande Group and Hui of illegally absorbing public deposits, fund-raising fraud, unlawful issuance of loans, fraudulent securities issuance, failure to disclose required information, and corporate bribery, while Hui alone was additionally convicted of illegally using funds and occupational embezzlement. Evergrande Real Estate was convicted solely of fraudulent securities issuance. Because Chinese law allows combined sentencing across multiple offenses, the court issued a single, aggregated punishment for both the corporate entities and Hui himself.
In its judgment, the court described the conduct as a serious blow to China's socialist market economic order, one that violated both public and private property rights, corroded the integrity expected of state-linked officials, and produced losses and social harm of an extraordinary scale, all factors the bench cited in justifying the severity of the sentence.
Fifty Six Others Sentenced In Related Cases
The Hui ruling was not delivered in isolation. On the same day, the Shenzhen Intermediate Court and the Shenzhen Nanshan District Court separately sentenced 56 other individuals tied to the Evergrande empire on charges including illegal public fundraising, fund-raising fraud and unlawful use of capital. Those defendants, among them Zhen Litao, Ke Peng, Xu Tenghe, Hui Ka-yan, Du Liang and Liang Dong, received prison terms ranging from one year and ten months to 18 years, along with fines or asset forfeiture. As with the lead case, courts ordered continued efforts to claw back illegal proceeds, with defendants on the hook for any remaining gap.
Debt Crisis Behind The Verdict
The verdict caps the legal fallout from what became China's largest corporate debt collapse. Once the country's top-selling homebuilder, Evergrande buckled under more than $300 billion in liabilities, defaulted on its offshore debt and was ultimately delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company's unraveling left hundreds of thousands of presold apartments unfinished across China and triggered a prolonged, still-unresolved restructuring process that has rattled homebuyers, creditors and the broader property industry. Thursday's rulings settle the criminal accountability of Evergrande's founder and dozens of associates, but the broader task of unwinding the group's debts and delivering stalled housing projects to buyers remains ongoing.
