Bloomberg: Evergrande Founder Hui Ka Yan “Under Surveillance”

Hui Ka Yan, who founded the Chinese construction company Evergrande in Guangzhou in 1996, is under Chinese police surveillance. In just a few years, he went from creating a real construction empire to a company under threat of liquidation. This kind of development is likely to have serious consequences for the entire Chinese and global economy.

Bloomberg News reports that Chinese police arrested Hui earlier this month. Hui Ka Yan was one of the richest men in China. Now he is accused of driving one of the pearls of Chinese real estate into bankruptcy. The industry recently accounted for about a third of Beijing’s GDP. Evergrande has accumulated about $300 billion in debt.

Hui pushed Evergande’s expansion quite aggressively, demanding large amounts of funding and selling products at low prices in order to quickly increase revenue. Thus, according to Reuters, the group’s annual sales reached 700 billion yuan ($95.8 billion) in 2020. Hui was Asia’s richest person in 2017, with a net worth of $45.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

Recently, on September 25, the group’s stock prices crashed again on the Hong Kong stock market by -25.45%, following the statement that it could not issue new bonds due to an investigation into its main branch in China.