Hong Kong Stock Exchange Erases Evergrande Listing

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange removed the Chinese company Evergrande from its market on Monday, the New York Times reported. The company debuted 16 years ago.

The formal removal of the firm from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was the latest symbol of how far Evergrande has fallen, a collapse that proved to be a contagion for other major Chinese developers and an issue that rocked the nation’s economy altogether.

Last year, a Hong Kong judge put the company’s endgame into motion, declaring it needed to liquidate after years of struggles and an accumulation of more than $300 billion in debt.

At that point, Evergrande had already filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in the United States in an attempt to restructure. The company defaulted on an offshore dollar bond in December 2021 and had been fighting for survival ever since, losing $81 billion between 2021 and 2022.

Left in the wake of the company’s collapse are more than 1,300 unfinished projects and hundreds of thousands of homebuyers left waiting for apartments that may never come.

Creditors, meanwhile, are making attempts to be made whole, leading to asset freezings and seizures. But Evergrande’s complicated business structure has made the reclamation of assets a near-impossible task for many.

In Hong Kong, creditors are pursuing the repayment of $45 billion. Alvarez & Marsal, tasked with leading the liquidation, has only turned over $255 million of that and said there is “serious doubt on the amounts, if any, that may ultimately be realized for the benefit of the company’s creditors.”

The liquidators and creditors are targeting former chairman Hui Ka Yan, his wife, Ding Yu Mei and Evergrande’s former chief executive, Xia Haijun; one case involves $6 billion of assets Yan and other executives allegedly received.

— Holden Walter-Warner