Hui Ka Yan, the founder and former chair of troubled Chinese property giant, Evergrande Group, pleaded guilty to a slew of charges on Tuesday in a showcase trial in the southern province of Guangdong. File photo by Wu Hong/EPA
The founder and former chairman of Chinese property giant China Evergrande Group pleaded guilty Tuesday to a slew of charges, including embezzlement, securities fraud and corporate graft at a trial in the southern city of Shenzhen.
Hui Ka Yan admitted “illegally absorbing public deposits” where buyers’ down payments on apartments off-plan were used to fund hundreds of other projects in the case in which Evergrande Real Estate Group also faced a similar set of charges, the Intermediate People’s Court of Shenzhen said in a statement online.
Evergrande took in millions of dollars from buyers that, instead of being used to complete the properties they were purchasing, were diverted to new developments, the court heard.
Hui also admitted fundraising fraud, illegal issuance of loans and unauthorized disclosure of “important information” during the high-profile two-day trial, which was attended by deputies from the National People’s Congress, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of which he was once a standing committee member, and investors.
The court statement said China Evergrande Group and Evergrande Real Estate Group were also indicted on charges of illegally collecting public deposits, fundraising fraud, illegal issuance of loans and fraudulent issuance of securities.
The downfall of the business tycoon, once Asia’s richest with a net worth of more than $42 billion, began in 2021 when the property empire he founded 25 years earlier collapsed after a massive Chinese property bubble burst, leaving 1,300 half-finished Evergrande developments financed with $300 billion of debt.
Hui was placed under house arrest in September 2023, prompting the suspension of trading in Evergrande shares by market regulators across the border in Hong Kong, only a month after trading had resumed following a 17-month suspension.
The company was also the subject of a winding-up petition in a Hong Kong court brought by creditors and had sought protection from being made bankrupt in the United States in a New York court the previous month.
Hong Kong regulators initially suspended Evergrande for failing to issue financial results for two years. When it did report in July 2023, it said it had lost $81.1 billion total in 2021 and 2022, mostly through payments to suppliers and lenders, as it battled to finish thousands of housing projects across 280 Chinese cities.
In January 2024, after repeated reprieves to allow it time to come up with a viable plan to restructure liabilities that had by then grown to at least $325 billion, the court in Hong Kong placed Evergrande into liquidation.
Hui was handed a $6.5 million fine in March 2024 for Evergrande, stating in its results that revenue was $78 billion more than it actually was and was handed a lifetime ban from participating in China’s capital market.
The final blow came in August 2025 with the delisting by regulators of Evergrande shares from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, almost 16 years to the day after it was the most oversubscribed IPO of 2009 with a valuation in excess of $50 billion.
The ban was imposed after an 18-month deadline for Evergrande stock to resume trading passed the previous month, with the company opting not to appeal the decision.
Hui had led a 15-year drive to grow Evergrande into one of China’s largest businesses, spending billions expanding into tourism and recreation, healthcare, finance, EV manufacturing and infrastructure, entertainment and agribusiness.
In 2020, it began work on a new $1.7 billion, 100,000-seat stadium for Guangzhou FC, the soccer club it had purchased 10 years earlier.
However, the company’s growth was delivered through massive borrowing, much of it highly leveraged, with the result that six years on the stadium, like many of Evergrande’s projects, it remains incomplete after it was seized by the government in November 2021.
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Children race to push colored eggs across the grass during the annual Easter Egg Roll event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on April 21, 2025. Easter this year takes place on April 5. Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI | License Photo
