A court in Shenzhen sentenced Evergrande Group founder Xu Jiayin to life in prison on Thursday, five years after the property developer’s landmark default touched off China’s broader real estate crisis.
The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court convicted Xu, who also goes by his Cantonese name Hui Ka Yan, on charges including illegal deposit-taking, fundraising fraud, securities fraud and embezzlement, among others, for conduct dating back to 2016.
Judges revoked Xu’s political rights for the rest of his life and seized his personal assets in full, ordering continued efforts to recover his illegal gains and make up any shortfall through restitution. The court based the life term on what it called “multiple combined crimes.”
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Evergrande received an 8.82 billion yuan fine, and its onshore real estate unit was fined a further 7 billion yuan, putting the combined penalty at roughly $2.4 billion. Judges also sent five additional former Evergrande executives to prison on Thursday, with terms ranging from 6 to 18 years for related fraud.
Xu pleaded guilty in April to eight charges, including misuse of funds and illegal deposit-taking, following a trial that wrapped up in under two days. Authorities have held him in an undisclosed location since September 2023, when Evergrande first disclosed he was under investigation.
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Regulators separately barred Xu, once ranked China’s richest man with a fortune estimated at $43 billion in 2017, from the securities market for life in March 2024 and fined him $6.5 million after finding that Evergrande’s flagship onshore unit had inflated its revenue by $78 billion over 2019 and 2020.
Xu founded Evergrande in 1996 and grew it into China’s largest property developer, with a stock market valuation exceeding $50 billion before the company defaulted in 2021 under more than $300 billion in liabilities. The fallout helped push Chinese home prices to their lowest level in more than two decades, and Hong Kong’s High Court ordered the company liquidated before the exchange delisted its shares in August 2025.
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Evergrande’s Cayman Islands parent remains in liquidation proceedings in Hong Kong, a process that continues separately from Thursday’s criminal case in Shenzhen.
