The founder and former chairman of China Evergrande Group, Hui Ka-Yan, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to eight-count charges, including the misuse of funds, corporate bribery and fundraising fraud.
The ruling comes five years after the company’s collapse severely impacted the country’s economy and financial markets.
A court in Shenzhen, China, on Thursday found the 67-year-old businessman guilty of “multiple-combined crimes” including financial misrepresentation and overstating the revenue generated by his company by about $80 billion in 2019 and 2020.
Mr Ka-Yan pleaded guilty to concealing his liabilities, inflating his assets to give the public and investors a false picture of the property development company, illegally extending loans, fraudulently issuing securities, and bribery.
The court ordered the businessman’s property to be confiscated, his political rights to be deprived for life, and his company Evergrande to be fined $1.31 billion, with its onshore operating unit, Hengda Real Estate, fined $1.04 billion.
“The criminal acts of Evergrande Group, Hengda Real Estate, and Hui Ka Yan involved particularly huge amounts and egregious circumstances,” the court said in a statement.
It added that the actions of the company’s founder and, by extension, his firm “caused particularly significant economic losses and caused particularly serious social harm, and should be severely punished according to law”.
The court also sentenced five other senior executives in the company, levying fines and imposing prison terms ranging from six to 18 years.