The founder of the world’s most-indebted property developer was sentenced to life in prison in China for fraud and bribery – five years after his China Evergrande Group collapsed, roiling the Chinese economy and financial markets.

Hui Ka Yan, 67, was convicted in a court in the southern city of Shenzhen on Thursday and the companies were fined a total of more than $2.3 billion for financial crimes, including inflating the group’s assets and concealing its liabilities that ran more than $300 billion.

“The amount involved is exceptionally large, the circumstances are particularly egregious, and extraordinarily heavy economic losses have been caused,” the court wrote in a statement. “The harm to society is extremely serious. Therefore, severe punishment should be given in accordance with the law.”

Hui, also known as Xu Jiayin, abused his position in orchestrating fraud and misappropriating company assets, the court found.

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Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China’s Evergrande Group, was sentenced to life in prison for fraud and bribery in the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China on August 20, 2026. (Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court/Handout / Reuters Photos)

Evergrande group was fined 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion) and Evergrande Real Estate Group was fined 7 billion yuan ($1.04 billion).

Hui’s sons, Xu Tenghe and Xu Zhijian, were also sentenced alongside senior Evergrande executives and others linked to the group, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. A total of more than 50 individuals were sentenced to imprisonment of between 22 months and 18 years.

Photos released by the court showed a gray-haired Hui standing between two officers in a navy collared shirt as the sentence was announced. He had largely disappeared from public view after Chinese authorities detained him in 2023.

His life sentence is a dramatic end to the career of a man who built one of China’s largest real estate empires in a rags-to-riches story. Born in 1958 into a rural family in central China’s Henan province, he worked in the steel industry in the 1980s before establishing Evergrande, which then prospered during China’s housing market boom. He was one of many businessmen who also gained political influence by joining a major advisory organization, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC).

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The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China sentenced Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China’s Evergrande Group and once Asia’s richest man, to life in prison on August 20, 2026. (Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court/Handout / Reuters Photos)

The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court ordered the confiscation of Hui’s personal property after he pleaded guilty in April to eight charges that included fundraising fraud, illegally taking public deposits, fraudulently issuing securities and bribery.

Chinese authorities cracked down on excessive borrowing in the real estate industry in 2020, triggering a crunch among many developers that brought on a downturn in the property market.

Evergrande, founded by Hui in 1996, expanded aggressively during China’s decades-long property boom, borrowing heavily as it built projects across the country. At its peak, the company became China’s largest developer by contracted sales, while Hui amassed a fortune that made him Asia’s richest man in 2017, with an estimated net worth of more than $45 billion, according to Forbes.

Its collapse helped ignite a broader crisis in China’s real estate sector, where falling home sales, unfinished projects and developer defaults have weighed on economic growth and consumer confidence for years.

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The fallout also reached millions of ordinary Chinese investors and homebuyers. Evergrande’s inability to repay wealth-management products prompted protests after investors saw savings wiped out, while buyers of unfinished apartments were left uncertain about whether their homes would ever be completed.

Comments by Evergrande homeowners in a social media group included: “All ordinary citizens have paid the cost,” “Imprisonment is meant to protect him. If he comes out, his life is in jeopardy,” and, “What about our money?”

Chinese authorities said revenues were overstated by tens of billions of dollars in 2019 and 2020.

Hui had already faced regulatory punishment before Thursday’s criminal sentence. In 2024, China’s securities regulator fined him roughly $6.5 million and barred him from the country’s securities markets for life over inflated financial results and other violations.

Evergrande’s corporate demise has continued even as Hui’s criminal case moved through the courts.

China Evergrande Group’s then-Chairman Hui Ka Yan attends a news conference on the property developer’s annual results in Hong Kong, China on March 28, 2017. (Bobby Yip/File Photo / Reuters Photos)

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A Hong Kong court ordered the company into liquidation in 2024, and its shares were later delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.