The founder of China Evergrande Group — once Asia's richest man — was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday, five years after his real-estate empire collapsed under debts that shook China's economy and rattled global markets.

The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court convicted Hui Ka Yan, 67, also known as Xu Jiayin, of a sweeping list of financial crimes, ordering the confiscation of all his personal property and stripping him of his political rights for life. He had pleaded guilty in April to eight charges, including fundraising fraud, illegally absorbing public deposits, fraudulently issuing securities and bribery.

A $300 Billion Fall

Evergrande itself was fined 8.82 billion yuan (roughly $1.31 billion), while its main operating unit, Hengda Real Estate, was fined a further 7 billion yuan — among the largest corporate penalties ever handed down in a Chinese criminal case, according to NPR's reporting. Prosecutors said the fraud, carried out between 2016 and 2021, involved booking revenue years before properties were even delivered, inflating Evergrande's books by tens of billions of dollars while the company piled up more than $300 billion in liabilities before its 2021 default sent shockwaves through global credit markets.

Hui was not sentenced alone. His two sons, Xu Tenghe and Xu Zhijian, were convicted alongside a raft of senior executives, with more than 50 people in total handed prison terms ranging from 22 months to 18 years, Chinese state media reported.

"INFLATED ASSETS, CONCEALED LIABILITIES AND COMMITTED CRIMES"

That phrase, from the court's own findings on the scale of the fraud, underscores what regulators have called a textbook case of a developer manufacturing growth on paper while its real finances buckled. Evergrande was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after a court-ordered liquidation, and its unraveling helped trigger a broader crisis across China's property sector — long the backbone of the country's economic growth — that has weighed on homebuyers, suppliers and local governments for half a decade.

Commentators inside China framed the verdict as symbolic as well as punitive. Analysts covering the case, cited in coverage from the South China Morning Post, described the sentencing as marking the formal end of the high-debt, high-leverage growth model that defined a generation of Chinese property tycoons. Beijing has spent years trying to contain the fallout from Evergrande's implosion without triggering a wider financial panic, steering banks and local governments through a slow-motion unwind rather than a disorderly crash.

What remains unresolved is how much of the $300 billion-plus owed to homebuyers, banks and bondholders — many of them overseas investors — will ever be recovered. The Shenzhen court said it would pursue further recovery of illegal gains and order restitution if asset seizures fall short, though liquidators have already spent years chasing Evergrande's scattered offshore holdings with limited success. For the millions of Chinese families still waiting on unfinished apartments they paid for years ago, Thursday's life sentence closes a criminal case — but not the financial reckoning that follows it.