Evergrande Founder Sentenced to Life in Prison by Chinese Regime

The founder of China Evergrande Group, Xu Jiayin, was sentenced to life in prison on Aug. 20, five years after the giant property development firm collapsed under the weight of its debts.Xu, who is also known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, pleaded guilty in April to misuse of funds, ⁠fundraising fraud, illegally taking public deposits, illegally extending loans, and fraudulently issuing securities and bribery.The 67-year-old former tycoon was sentenced in Shenzhen in southern China, and the court also confiscated all of his personal property.The court also fined Evergrande 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion) and its Hengda real estate subsidiary 7 billion yuan ($1.04 billion).Xu has not been seen in public since 2023, but Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court released photographs, showing him wearing a blue shirt and flanked by two officers as the sentence was read out.Crimes Should be ‘Severely Punished’“The criminal acts of Evergrande Group, Hengda Real Estate, ‌and Hui Ka Yan … involved ⁠particularly huge amounts and egregious circumstances, caused particularly significant economic losses and caused particularly serious social harm, and should be severely punished,” the court said in ‌a statement.State media Xinhua news agency said the court sentenced 56 others to prison sentences of between 22 months and 18 years for their roles in “illegally absorbing public deposits, fundraising fraud, and illegal use of funds” in relation to the Evergrande case. It did not name any of the individuals.It was not immediately clear whether Xu had legal representatives who could comment on his behalf.After a two-day trial in April, Xu “pleaded guilty and expressed remorse,” according to state media Xinhua.Born into poverty, Xu became Asia’s richest man, partly due to links with senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).He expanded Evergrande massively during China’s property boom between 1996 and 2019, but the company was burdened with huge debts.Evergrande, which was China’s biggest developer, ran into financial problems in 2020 amid China’s COVID-19 crisis, and in 2021, it developed liquidity issues. In March 2024, the company and Xu were penalized after being accused of artificially boosting its revenues by $78 billion in the two years before it defaulted on its debt obligations.A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande to be liquidated in 2024, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange delisted it in 2025.The company has defaulted on most of its $300 billion liabilities. Its problems are emblematic of a prolonged slowdown in China’s real estate sector, which has dragged ​down the world’s second-biggest economy.The China Evergrande Centre building sign in Hong Kong on Dec. 7, 2021. Tyrone Siu/ReutersA former steel technician, Xu founded Evergrande in 1996.As the communist regime gradually opened up its market and eased controls, Xu, like many other Chinese, moved to the southern coastal province of Guangdong, where he worked as a salesperson before founding Evergrande in 1996.In his first project, Xu borrowed 3 million yuan (about $440,000) from the bank to purchase land, then started selling homes once construction began, according to a 2010 report by People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP.Within a day, he had sold more than 300 apartments and raked in 80 million yuan (about $11.7 million), allowing him to finance the next project, according to the report.By the end of 2009, Evergrande had dozens of projects across 25 major Chinese cities, according to the company’s official website.He Was Once Worth $45 BillionIn 2017, Xu ​had a net worth of $45.3 billion, according to ⁠Forbes.Xu stepped down as chairman of Hengda in August 2021, two months before the company defaulted on a $148 million loan, the first of many debts it was unable to repay.The liquidation process has ​moved ‌slowly. Only $255 million worth of assets were sold as of August 2025, compared with creditors’ claims totalling $45 billion.Evergrande’s liquidators declined to comment on Xu’s sentencing.The liquidators are trying to freeze Xu’s offshore assets and those of his ex-wife, Ding Yumei, who owns property in London and Vancouver.Ding flew out of Hong Kong before August 2023, China’s state-controlled Tencent News reported, and her current whereabouts are unknown.Speaking at the 2018 China Charity Awards, Xu praised the CCP and attributed everything Evergrande and he had to the regime.Yuan Hongbing, a former professor of law at Peking University who now lives in exile in Australia, told The Epoch Times in 2023 that Xu had used political connections with Zeng Qinghong, a senior CCP official who was vice president from 2003 to 2008.But Feng Chongyi, an associate professor in China studies at the University of Technology Sydney, told The Epoch Times this week that Xi had spent years weakening forces associated with Jiang Zemin and Zeng, who was his longtime political ally, because they once threatened Xi’s hold on power.Reuters contributed to this report.