2024-02-04 04:40:00
Hui Ka Yan, founder and president of Evergrande.jose manuel esteban
The fate of the bankrupt Chinese real estate Evergrande and its founder, Hui Ka Yan (Zhoukou, 1958), is cast. As always when a businessman from that country falls from grace, his fate does not look too good. On Monday, a Hong Kong court finally issued the order to liquidate it, after a year and a half of judicial proceedings and a total of two and a half years of crisis. In March of last year, the firm had presented a proposal to restructure its $300 billion in debts, including $20 billion abroad; but it was not approved. Furthermore, since September, Hui has been under police surveillance.
The founder is the largest shareholder, with around 60% of the capital. His fortune reached $36 billion in 2019, according to Forbes. The pandemic took its toll on the business, but when it was recovering, in 2021, the group’s liquidity problems began. Now, his assets are estimated at 3.1 billion, coming from the dividends paid by Evergrande over the years.
Hui’s wife, Ding Yumei – with whom he has two children – no longer appears as such in the latest real estate company documents, so it is deduced that they have divorced, as have other directors and directors of their respective wives. , with the idea of protecting his wealth from the Chinese authorities.
The businessman was born in the village of Jutaigang, in Henan province, in the center of the country. His father was a retired soldier who participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 1940s. After the communist state was established, he became a warehouseman. Hui’s mother died of septicemia when he was 8 months old, so he was raised by his paternal grandmother.
After high school, he worked in a cement products factory, where he was the head of the production team. He took the university entrance examination in 1978, and was admitted to the Wuhan Institute of Iron and Steel (now Wuhan University of Science and Technology), where he served as commissar in charge of hygiene for his class. .
Recently graduated in 1982, he was assigned as a technician to the heat treatment workshop of the Wuyang Iron and Steel Company; A year later he was already deputy director, and in 1985, director, a position he held for seven years. He resigned and moved to Shenzhen, the newly founded special economic zone in Guangdong province in the southeast of the country. There, and in the area’s capital, Guangzhou, he worked for the Zhongda group, dedicated to commodity trading, industry and real estate, as well as investment.
In 1996 he left the company, and a year later, during a period of widespread urbanization in China, he founded the Evergrande group (first called Hongda), also becoming its president. The firm went public in Hong Kong in 2009, where it raised the equivalent of US$722 million. In subsequent years, it would also sell about $5.5 billion in investment products, the proceeds of which would go to other group projects.
In 2008, Hui became a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
(CPPCC), China’s highest political advisory body. He was promoted to the Standing Committee of the CPPCC National Committee in 2013, and he has actively participated in the conventions since then. He attended the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021, but then they stopped inviting him.
During the pandemic, the Government tightened leverage regulations, which contributed to Evergrande’s liquidity and default problems beginning in the summer of 2021, as well as falls on the stock market.
In March 2022, Fitch declares it insolvent. The company announced that it would negotiate a restructuring plan with its creditors abroad, which it would end up presenting a year later. But before the vote is taken, last fall, the police arrest several employees of the group. Hui has been under surveillance since September.
Talks to restructure the liabilities continue, but bondholders oppose the company’s proposal. On January 8, the group’s electric vehicle subsidiary announces that its vice president, Liu Yongzhuo, has been arrested. Finally, last Monday, a Hong Kong court ordered the liquidation.
Evergrande still has $240 billion in assets, but most of it has already been seized by local governments and lenders to protect local buyers. Contractors and suppliers have filed more than 500 lawsuits over late payments. The cross-border nature of the process can generate complications and last years. Hui can sit and wait.
Other projects
Hui Ka Yan is the owner of Guangzhou Evergrande soccer team, now in the second category, but which has won several national and international titles in the past decade.
In 2019, Hui announced a $6.4 billion investment in an electric car subsidiary.
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