Unfinished apartment buildings at China Evergrande Group's Health Valley development on the outskirts of Nanjing, China, in 2021. Photo / Getty Images
Unfinished apartment buildings at China Evergrande Group's Health Valley development on the outskirts of Nanjing, China, in 2021. Photo / Getty Images
China Evergrande, delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday, leaves behind a giant pile of debt and a long line of desperate creditors.
The moment passed without fanfare. China Evergrande, a real estate developer that once represented the pinnacle of China’s economic prowess, was formally removed from theHong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday.
Evergrande, which made its financial debut in Hong Kong 16 years ago, had once been the fastest growing property developer in a country brimming with promise of profits for investors. It will be remembered as one of the world’s most indebted companies whose collapse brought China’s financial system to the brink.
The company tested Beijing’s longtime “too big to fail” policy toward its biggest companies. It shattered its tolerance of unchecked borrowing by giant corporations. And Evergrande’s collapse in 2021, under more than US$300 billion ($523b) of debt, exposed the vulnerabilities of China’s economy and its dependence on real estate as a driver of growth.
Now what’s left is the carcass of a corporate behemoth – 1300 not-yet-finished real estate projects in more than 280 cities and hundreds of thousands of homebuyers still waiting on their apartments. Then there’s the long line of creditors, from businesses in China that worked for Evergrande to investors in London and New York who bet on it, still waiting to be repaid.
Last year, a Hong Kong judge ordered Evergrande to be dismantled. She appointed Alvarez & Marsal, a firm that specialises in bankruptcies and once helped unwind Lehman Brothers, to do the task. A year and a half into the job, the liquidators, two executives at Alvarez & Marsal, have made small steps toward helping overseas creditors get tiny slices of what they are due.
The latest publicly disclosed documents from Evergrande demonstrate the challenges.
Creditors have made hundreds of legal moves against Evergrande’s projects in China, and dozens of assets have been frozen. In some cases, investors or local governments have taken over developments. It is already difficult for the Hong Kong liquidators to reclaim assets for other creditors because of Evergrande’s complex business structure with thousands of subsidiaries.
To squeeze money out of what is left of Evergrande, the liquidators have to take over each subsidiary one at a time. Alvarez & Marsal has so far taken control of more than 100 companies and assets worth about US$3.5b.
But only about US$255 million of the US$45b that creditors in Hong Kong claim they are owed has been scrounged up. And the liquidators have warned that even the value of some of the seized assets is in question, casting “serious doubt on the amounts, if any, that may ultimately be realised for the benefit of the company’s creditors”. The liquidators are pursuing another legal route to try to extract money from Evergrande: going after the former chair, Hui Ka Yan, his wife, Ding Yu Mei, and Evergrande’s former CEO, Xia Haijun. A case taking place in Hong Kong, with hearings that are closed to the public, has targeted $6b of assets that Hui and other executives paid to themselves in the years after Evergrande’s Hong Kong public listing.
It is a study in the excess of a bygone era in China’s one-time freewheeling real estate industry. So far, the case has mostly focused on Hui’s wife and Xia. Hui was detained in 2023 and authorities have since fined him $6.5m and accused him of “organising fraud”.
The showroom of an Evergrande residential housing project in 2021. Photo / Gilles Sabrié, The New York Times
One recent filing to the court claimed that Xia, who was fined US$2m and banned from financial markets by a top Chinese regulator for securities fraud, is hiding assets worth US$24m in several houses and luxury cars in California.
One of those properties, in Irvine, is worth US$6.3m and was bought in April 2022, one month after Evergrande suddenly delayed its annual results for 2021 and said US$2b in loans had been seized by banks, court documents show. Several months later, Xia resigned over what the company said had been a plan to funnel $2b into one of its Hong Kong listed companies from a subsidiary.
Just a few months before Xia was fined in March 2024, his wife spent US$14.5m on a sprawling mansion in Newport Beach, California, according to court filings. He has told the court he does not own anything worth more than US$6400.
