China jails Evergrande founder for life, fines firm over $2bn

(FILES) This photo taken on June 5, 2017 shows Evergrande’s president Xu Jiayin, also known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, attending a meeting in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province. A Chinese court on August 20, 2026 fined embattled property giant Evergrande billions of yuan and sentenced its founder Xu Jiayin to life in prison. (Photo by CN-STR / AFP) / China OUT

China on Thursday sentenced the founder of embattled property giant Evergrande to life in prison and fined the company and an affiliate more than US$2 billion after a high-profile default five years ago.

Evergrande Group was the face of Chinese real estate, surfing a decades-long property boom as it peddled home-ownership dreams but its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation.

The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors.

On Thursday, a court in south China fined the firm and its real estate arm a total of 15.82 billion yuan ($2.4 billion).

It sentenced founder Xu Jiayin, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, to life for a list of crimes including “large-scale financial fraud”.

“Xu Jiayin was sentenced for multiple crimes and fined, received a life sentence, with political rights revoked for life and all his personal property confiscated,” the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in Guangdong province said in a post on its WeChat account.

Between 2016 and 2021, Evergrande and Xu as boss “violated national laws by engaging in continuous, large-scale financial fraud and other means to inflate assets and conceal liabilities”, the court said.

It added that the parties “gained control of financial institutions” through bribery, without naming the institutions.

Xu pleaded guilty in April to charges that also included embezzlement and bribery, according to the court at the time.

Five other senior executives of Evergrande Group were also sentenced Thursday to prison terms ranging from six to 18 years for crimes including fraud, the Shenzhen court said.