China Sentences Evergrande Founder to Life in Prison

China Sentences Evergrande Founder to Life in Prison - The New York Times

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China Sentences Evergrande Founder to Life in Prison

Hui Ka Yan’s punishment caps the downfall of a property empire whose collapse set off a prolonged crisis in the Chinese economy.

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*Hui Ka Yan, the founder and former chairman of Evergrande, at a news conference in Hong Kong in 2017.

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Bobby Yip/Reuters*

By

Yan Zhuang and Alexandra Stevenson

Yan Zhuang reported from Seoul and Alexandra Stevenson reported from Hong Kong.

Aug. 20, 2026

Updated 6:28 a.m. ET

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A court in China on Thursday sentenced the billionaire founder of Evergrande to life in prison, years after the real estate giant’s collapse brought China’s financial system to the brink.

Hui Ka Yan, the company’s founder and former chairman, was also ordered to forfeit all of his personal assets, marking the final chapter in a remarkable fall from the upper echelons of Chinese society. Once one of the world’s richest men, Mr. Hui had belonged to an elite group of political advisers and cultivated the image of a flamboyant tycoon.

The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court found that between 2016 and 2021, Mr. Hui and Evergrande engaged in large-scale financial fraud and committed crimes including misuse of funds, fund-raising fraud and illegally taking public deposits, according to an announcement the court posted on social media. Mr. Hui pleaded guilty to the charges in April.

On Thursday, Mr. Hui stood expressionless in a navy blue shirt, flanked by two police officers, as the court handed down its sentence. It was the first time he had been seen in public since his sudden disappearance in 2023. His hair, once jet black, was now white. (In more flush times, Mr. Hui wore a gold-buckled Hermès belt to a staid political conference and traveled to Paris to taste rare French wines.)

The court stripped him of his political rights for life and fined Evergrande Group and its subsidiary, Evergrande Real Estate Group, a combined $2.35 billion.

Evergrande was once China’s fastest-growing property developer. But its collapse in 2021 under more than $300 billion of debt pushed China’s financial system to the edge and exposed a vulnerability in the Chinese economy: its extraordinary dependency on real estate to drive growth.

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