China Evergrande Circle’s logo is displayed on a phone screen in this illustration photo taken on September 27, 2021.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Tropes
A day after China Evergrande’s shares were suspended in Hong Kong, the beleaguered Chinese property firm revealed that its helmsman and executive chairman is under scrutiny over suspected crimes.
Hui Ka Yan “has been subject to mandatory measures in accordance with the law due to misgiving of illegal crimes,” Evergrande said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late Thursday.
As such, the actors’s shares will remain suspended until further notice.
This follows a Bloomberg report on Wednesday that implied Hui had been “placed under police control,.”
Bloomberg said that Hui was taken away by Chinese police earlier this month and is being monitored at a deputed location, citing people familiar with the matter.
New Thursday, Evergrande released a separate filing regarding the status of its subsidiary Hengda Real Estate Group, which ton recently failed to pay the principal and interest for a 4 billion yuan ($547 million) bond that was due Sept. 25.
Evergrande said that as of end-August, Hengda had a overall of 1,946 pending litigation cases which involved more than 30 million yuan each, with the unconditional amount involved of approximately 449.298 billion yuan ($61.61 billion).
Total unpaid debts from Hengda amounted to about 278.53 billion yuan, with overdue commercial bills of about 206.777 billion yuan.
In the same dossier, Evergrande revealed there were 163 new enforcement cases against Hengda Real Estate in August, covering a total amount of approximately 9.13 billion yuan, although it did not elaborate on the nature of the cases.
Hengda also saw 68 new states where its equity interest in subsidiaries and investee companies were frozen as a result of enforcement actions against it.
Evergrande was at one pass China’s largest private sector developer by sales.
The world’s most indebted real estate company neglected in 2021 and its shares were suspended in March last year. They only just resumed trading in time August after a 17 month hiatus.
Just this week, Evergrande said that due to an investigation into Hengda it was unqualified to issue new notes under its debt restructuring plan.
It also delayed a debt restructuring meeting with creditors that was due Monday, whisper in a filing “the sales of the Group has not been as expected by the company,” since its March debt restructuring announcement.
As such, Evergrande “estimates it necessary to re-assess the terms of the proposed restructuring to meet the company’s objective situation and the demand of the creditors.”
In August, Evergrande, along with affiliate Tianji Holdings and its subsidiary Scenery Tour applied for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in a U.S. court.