China has sentenced Hui Ka Yan, the founder of the world's most-indebted property developer, to life in prison for fraud and bribery, five years after his China Evergrande Group collapsed, roiling the Chinese economy and financial markets.

Hui, 67, was convicted on Thursday by a court in the southern city of Shenzhen. The companies at the heart of the case were fined a combined total of more than $2.3 billion for financial crimes that included inflating the group's assets and concealing liabilities that had run to more than $300 billion.

"The amount involved is exceptionally large, the circumstances are particularly egregious, and extraordinarily heavy economic losses have been caused," the court wrote in a statement. "The harm to society is extremely serious. Therefore, severe punishment should be given in accordance with the law."

The court found that Hui, who is also known as Xu Jiayin, abused his position to orchestrate fraud and misappropriate company assets. Evergrande Group was fined 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion), while Evergrande Real Estate Group was fined 7 billion yuan ($1.04 billion).

According to China's official Xinhua News Agency, Hui's sons, Xu Tenghe and Xu Zhijian, were sentenced alongside senior Evergrande executives and others connected to the group. In total, more than 50 individuals received prison terms ranging from 22 months to 18 years.

Photographs released by the court showed a gray-haired Hui, dressed in a navy collared shirt, standing between two officers as the sentence was announced. He had largely disappeared from public view since Chinese authorities detained him in 2023.

The life sentence marks a dramatic end to the career of a man who built one of China's largest real estate empires in a rags-to-riches rise. Born in 1958 into a rural family in central China's Henan province, Hui worked in the steel industry in the 1980s before establishing Evergrande, which prospered during China's housing market boom. Like many businessmen of his generation, he also gained political influence by joining a major advisory organization, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC).

The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court ordered the confiscation of Hui's personal property. He had pleaded guilty in April to eight charges that included fundraising fraud, illegally taking public deposits, fraudulently issuing securities and bribery.

Evergrande's downfall traces back to a broader regulatory shift. In 2020, Chinese authorities rolled out rules known as the "three red lines," which capped how much debt developers could carry relative to their assets, equity and cash holdings, triggering a crunch among many developers that brought on a downturn in the property market.

Founded by Hui in 1996, Evergrande expanded aggressively during China's decades-long property boom, borrowing heavily as it built projects across the country. At its peak, the company became China's largest developer by contracted sales, while Hui amassed a fortune that made him Asia's richest man in 2017, with an estimated net worth of more than $45 billion, according to Forbes.

The group slid into default on its dollar-denominated bonds in late 2021 as its liquidity crisis deepened, and its collapse helped ignite a broader crisis in China's real estate sector, where falling home sales, unfinished projects and developer defaults have weighed on economic growth and consumer confidence for years. Property and related industries are estimated by many economists to account for roughly a quarter of China's economic activity, one reason the sector's troubles have rippled so widely through the world's second-largest economy.

The fallout also reached millions of ordinary Chinese investors and homebuyers. Evergrande's inability to repay wealth-management products prompted protests after investors saw their savings wiped out, while buyers of unfinished apartments were left uncertain about whether their homes would ever be completed.

In a social media group, Evergrande homeowners commented: "All ordinary citizens have paid the cost," "Imprisonment is meant to protect him. If he comes out, his life is in jeopardy," and, "What about our money?"

Chinese authorities said revenues were overstated by tens of billions of dollars in 2019 and 2020.

Thursday's criminal sentence was not Hui's first punishment. In 2024, China's securities regulator fined him roughly $6.5 million and barred him from the country's securities markets for life over inflated financial results and other violations.

Evergrande's corporate demise has continued even as Hui's criminal case moved through the courts. A Hong Kong court ordered the company into liquidation in 2024, and its shares were later delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The liquidation process remains ongoing, with court-appointed liquidators winding down the group's remaining assets while creditors and homebuyers await clarity on how much of their claims may be recovered.

Source: Fox Business Markets. Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.