Evergrande founder gets life sentence

HELD ACCOUNTABLE: A total of 56 people were handed prison sentences, with terms for senior executives ranging from six to 18 years in jail, Xinhua reported

China yesterday sentenced the founder of embattled property giant Evergrande to life in prison and fined the group more than US$2 billion for offenses including fraud, five years after a high-profile default.

Evergrande Group was once the face of Chinese real estate, surfing a decades-long property boom as it peddled home-ownership dreams. However, 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.

Evergrande founder Xu Jiayin, center, is pictured during trial in Shenzhen, China, yesterday.

Photo: Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, AFP

A court in southern China fined the firm and its real-estate arm a total of 15.82 billion yuan (US$2.35 billion).

It issued a life sentence against founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), also known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, for crimes including “large-scale financial fraud,” the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in Guangdong Province said in a post on its WeChat account.

“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,” it said.

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

The parties “gained control of financial institutions” through bribery, it added.

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

The verdict caps 67-year-old Xu’s spectacular fall from grace. He was once one of China’s richest billionaires and a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s top political advisory body.

Xu and Evergrande’s actions “seriously disrupted the socialist market economic order... and undermined the integrity of official conduct by state personnel,” the court said.

“The circumstances were particularly egregious, causing particularly serious economic losses and causing particularly serious social harm,” it added.

Some lawmakers and members of the political advisory body, as well as relatives of the defendants, attended the verdict, the court said.

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

A total of 56 people were given jail sentences — including Xu’s two sons — with the shortest term one year and 10 months, China’s state news agency Xinhua reported.

The court also ordered that remaining shortfalls from illegal gains be returned.