Evergrande Founder Xu Jiayin Sentenced to Life in Prison

Xu Jiayin, once celebrated as China’s richest man, has been sentenced to life in prison, closing the criminal chapter on the collapse of the world’s most indebted property developer. The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court delivered the verdict on Thursday, stripping Xu of his political rights for life and ordering the confiscation of all his personal assets, with any shortfall in recovered illegal gains to be ordered repaid in restitution. The ruling ends the founder’s rags-to-riches arc, but it does little to resolve the billions still owed to Evergrande’s creditors, homebuyers and investors.

The court’s findings, covering conduct between 2016 and 2021, describe a sustained, large-scale fraud rather than a single bad decision. Xu and Evergrande Group were convicted of illegally absorbing public deposits, fundraising fraud, illegally issuing loans, fraudulent issuance of securities, unlawful disclosure of important information and corporate bribery, while Xu alone was additionally convicted of illegally using company funds and embezzlement. Evergrande gained control of financial institutions through bribery, the court said, channeling credit and insurance funds directly into the group’s operations, while Xu used his position atop Evergrande Real Estate to organize the fraud and misappropriate company property disguised as dividends, according to Global Times‘ account of the verdict.

The financial penalties attached to the ruling are the heaviest China has imposed in a corporate-fraud case of this scale. Evergrande Group was fined RMB 8.82 billion, and Evergrande Real Estate Group a further RMB 7 billion — a combined RMB 15.82 billion, or roughly $2.2–2.4 billion at current exchange rates, according to Hong Kong Free Press‘s reporting via AFP. Fifty-six other individuals tied to the case were separately sentenced to prison terms ranging from 22 months to 18 years, alongside fines or asset confiscation.

The scale of the criminal case is dwarfed by the scale of what it can’t fix. Evergrande’s collapse left it carrying more than $300 billion in liabilities after its 2021 default, and even after a Hong Kong court ordered the company liquidated in 2024, recovery has moved slowly. Liquidators have sold only about $255 million worth of assets against creditor claims totaling roughly $45 billion, according to Reuters‘ reporting on the liquidation’s progress — a gap that no criminal verdict, however severe, closes on its own.

That gap is where the human cost sits. Evergrande’s implosion left hundreds of thousands of pre-sold homes stalled mid-construction and wiped out wealth-management products that ordinary savers had treated as safe investments, sparking mortgage boycotts and scattered protests in the years since the default, as documented by China Digital Times‘ translations of domestic commentary. The recurring question among affected homeowners and investors is not whether Xu deserved prison, but whether his sentence brings them any closer to recovering what they paid for.

For Beijing, the verdict functions as a demonstration that even the country’s most politically connected tycoons are not shielded from accountability once a debt-fueled empire collapses. It caps a broader crackdown on excessive leverage in China’s property sector that began in 2020 and has since pulled down dozens of developers beyond Evergrande alone. But the contradiction at the center of the case remains unresolved: a court can strip a billionaire of his liberty and his assets, yet it cannot, by itself, finish an unbuilt apartment block or return a family’s life savings.