00:00It's one of the most dramatic rise and falls in Chinese corporate history.
00:03China Evergrande Group founder Hui Ka-Yen has been sentenced to life in prison.
00:08Hui was sentenced alongside 56 others involved in Evergrande, including his sons,
00:12and his assets will be confiscated.
00:14Once Asia's second richest man, Hui turned the company into a poster child of corporate excess
00:19during China's real estate boom.
00:21Now Chinese authorities said he committed massive financial fraud
00:23that included inflating assets and concealing liabilities.
00:26Now the move draws a curtain on what for years was one of China's great success stories.
00:31Because in its prime, the firm built more than 1,300 projects across 280 cities
00:36and for a time was the country's biggest developer by sales.
00:39Evergrande's expansion relied heavily on borrowing,
00:42turning it into the country's most indebted developer.
00:44And Hui transformed the property giant into a sprawling conglomerate.
00:48Now for a long time, Evergrande skirted liquidity scares by tapping tycoons in China and Hong Kong
00:53to buy the firm's stock and bonds.
00:55But Beijing's crackdown on the property sector capped its borrowing capacity
00:59and its empire came crashing down following a 2021 default.
01:04Then in 2024, Chinese regulators accused Evergrande of fraud
01:07that dwarfs that of Luckin Coffee and Enron.
01:10But Hui's sentence doesn't bring an end to the numerous legal fights surrounding the company.
01:14Evergrande is now in liquidation with an army of creditors pouring over its assets
01:18in the hopes of recovering some of their heavy losses.
01:21The company is left behind roughly 140 million square feet of sold but uncompleted homes across China.
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