Five years after a high-profile default, China penalized the group more than $2 billion and condemned the founder of the troubled real estate company Evergrande to life in prison on Thursday for offenses including fraud.Once the face of Chinese real estate, Evergrande Group promoted home-ownership aspirations while riding a decades-long real estate boom.However, when the government imposed restrictions on excessive borrowing and speculation, its access to credit drastically decreased.After having trouble paying creditors, the business went into default in 2021.
A southern Chinese court punished the company and its real estate division 15.82 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) on Thursday.Five years after a high-profile default, China sentenced the founder of the troubled real estate company Evergrande to life in prison and fined the group more than $2 billion on Thursday for offenses including 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," it said.

According to the court, Evergrande and Xu, its chairman, "violated national laws by engaging in continuous, large-scale financial fraud and other means to inflate assets and conceal liabilities" between 2016 and 2021.Without identifying the organizations, it also stated that the parties "gained control of financial institutions" through bribes.According to the court at the time, Xu entered a guilty plea in April to accusations that also included bribery and embezzlement.
"Serious harm to society"
The 67-year-old Xu's dramatic decline is capped by the verdict.
He was once a member of the top political advisory committee of the Communist Party and one of China's wealthiest billionaires.
A before-and-after photomontage was widely circulated on social media on Thursday. The older picture, which was taken years ago, features Xu grinning while being pursued by reporters. He has jet black hair and a gold Hermes belt.
The image, which was made public by the court on Thursday, showed a weathered, white-haired Xu facing a panel of judges while standing grimly with two police officers at his sides.According to the court, Xu and Evergrande's acts "seriously disrupted the socialist market economic order... and undermined the integrity of official conduct by state personnel"It further stated, "The circumstances were particularly egregious, causing particularly serious economic losses and causing particularly serious social harm."
The court reported that relatives of the defendants, together with a few MPs and members of the political advisory committee, attended the verdict.
Evergrande's story and comparable problems faced by other real estate behemoths like Country Garden and Vanke have been extensively monitored by observers evaluating the state of the second-largest economy in the world.For the past three years, China's new housing prices have been declining.According to the Shenzhen court, five additional senior executives of Evergrande Group were also given prison sentences ranging from six to eighteen years on Thursday for offenses like fraud.According to China's official news agency Xinhua, 56 individuals, including Xu's two sons, received prison sentences, the smallest of which was one year and ten months.Additionally, the court mandated the restitution of any leftover money from illicit gains.