Hui Ka Yan, once Asia’s richest man, pleaded guilty in April to eight charges, including misuse of funds, fundraising fraud, illegally taking public deposits, illegally extending loans, fraudulently issuing securities and bribery.
Evergrande, once China’s premier developer, has defaulted on most of its $300 billion in liabilities, its troubles symbolizing a crisis in the property sector that has long dragged on the world’s second-biggest economy.
Hui Ka Yan, founder of property developer Evergrande and once Asia’s richest man, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday.undefined/Xinhua via AP
‘What about our money?’
The sentence in the southern city of Shenzhen, which included confiscating all of Hui’s personal property, ends his rags-to-riches story but is unlikely to bring much solace to Evergrande’s domestic and foreign creditors.
Evergrande’s liquidators declined to comment on the sentence. Reuters could not reach legal representatives for Hui, who had not been seen in public since Chinese authorities detained him in 2023, following Evergrande’s default.
In pictures released by the court, a grey-haired Hui, 67, stood flanked by two officers, wearing a long-sleeved, navy blue collared shirt, as the court read out his sentence.
“The criminal acts of Evergrande Group, Hengda Real Estate, and Hui Ka Yan … involved particularly huge amounts and egregious circumstances, caused particularly significant economic losses and caused particularly serious social harm, and should be severely punished according to law,” the court said in a statement.
Hui, shown in 2017, had a net worth of $45.3 billion that year, the highest in Asia, according to Forbes.AFP via Getty Images
Comments by Evergrande homeowners in a social media group included: “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?”
In addition to Hui’s sentence, the court said it had fined Evergrande 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion) and its main subsidiary Hengda 7 billion yuan, and sentenced five other senior executives to fines and prison terms ranging from six to 18 years.
Altogether, 56 people linked to Evergrande, other than Hui, received sentences on Thursday, state media CCTV reported.
The company’s failure to repay billions of dollars in wealth-management products triggered protests that threatened social stability after ordinary investors, many of them on lower incomes, saw their holdings wiped out.
A housing complex by Chinese property developer Evergrande in Nanjing. Evergrande, once China’s premier developer, has defaulted on most of its $300 billion in liabilities.AFP via Getty Images
Evergrande liquidation drags on for years
A former steel technician raised by his grandmother in a rural village in central Henan province, Hui founded Evergrande in 1996 and turned it into China’s biggest property developer by contracted sales, aggressively taking on debt.
In 2017, Hui had a net worth of $45.3 billion, the highest in Asia, according to Forbes.
A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande liquidated in 2024, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange delisted it last year, bringing an end to a tumultuous boom-to-bust saga.
The liquidation process has moved at a glacial pace, according to its liquidators, with only about $255 million worth of assets sold as of last August, compared to creditors’ claims totalling $45 billion.
A Hong Kong court ordered Evergrande liquidated in 2024, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange delisted it last year, bringing an end to a tumultuous boom-to-bust saga.AFP via Getty Images
Outside mainland China, the liquidators are battling in court to freeze the offshore assets of Hui and his former spouse in a struggle to claw back $6 billion in dividends and remuneration paid to the founder and other former executives.
In 2024, China’s securities regulator fined Hui $6.6 million and barred him from the securities market for life, after finding Evergrande’s flagship unit had inflated earnings and committed securities fraud.
Homeowners associations across the country are quietly signing up for Flock Safety’s license plate cameras, and the backlash is now strong enough to blow up home sales, kill signed contracts and land cities in court, with New York at the center of the fight.
Nowhere is the backlash more raw than in the Adirondacks, where the fight has already toppled a signed contract and sparked open revolt inside a gated community.
In Saranac Lake, a resident living behind a gate who protested the cameras in his own neighborhood said the issue isn’t security itself. It’s who gets to look.
“The problem I have is not with security cameras. It’s with the Flock system directly. Anyone and their mother can have easy access to this database. The way the data is readily being shared. It is completely unconstitutional,” he told The Post.
Homeowners associations nationwide are quietly signing up for Flock Safety’s license plate reader cameras, and the backlash is now strong enough to kill signed contracts, spark lawsuits, and scare off homebuyers, with New York — particularly Saranac Lake — at the center of the fight.steheap – stock.adobe.com That anger boiled over at a packed Saranac Lake village board meetingearlier in the yearafter officials quietly signed a contract for a dozen license plate readers and security cameras using a state grant.
Residents said they’d learned about the rollout only after cameras started going up on telephone poles around town.
“These cameras are not going to keep us safe,” resident Sandra Kalinowski told the board, drawing applause from the crowd.
Another resident, David Lynch, pushed the board to reverse course entirely.
“First I believe these cameras are currently in violation of Saranac Lake Police Department policy. Secondly, I believe the public has been misled about Flock’s access to our data. My ask of you tonight is to take these cameras down. The village is conducting surveillance in violation of its own policy,” he said.
Members of the Saranac Lake volunteer fire department address the Saranac Lake Village Board.David Escobar, North Country Public Radio/Adirondack Explorer
A Flock Safety camera is seen on Broadway in Saranac Lake, outside of Kinney Drugs.David Escobar, North Country Public Radio/Adirondack Explorer
The board caved. Trustees voted 4-1 to kill the Flock contract outright and swore off ever signing with the company again, a stunning reversal for a deal that had already been in place for months.
Trustee Aurora White, who pushed the toughest language in the resolution, said the village had no business holding onto the kind of data Flock’s system generates.
“We don’t have the expertise to be proper stewards of this data,” she said.
It’s not just a small mountain town. Communities across New York are colliding with the same technology, and the fights are getting uglier.
In Newburgh, a city council push to rip out Flock cameras entirely failed to get enough votes this week, leaving residents furious and officials divided. Councilman Omari Shakur, who led the failed push, didn’t hide his frustration with the holdup.
“We’ve been talking about this for three months, that’s discussing what we worked on,” he said last week during the failed vote.
In Saranac Lake, a gated community resident’s complaint that the camera database is “easily accessible” helped fuel a village board revolt that killed the town’s Flock contract entirely.jonbilous – stock.adobe.com
The same pattern is hitting home sales directly: a broker’s viral Reddit post describing a buyer who canceled a showing after spotting HOA-run Flock cameras near a pool has become a rallying point for a wider trend of buyers checking crowdsourced surveillance maps before booking tours.Reddit/Character-Reaction12
In Troy, the standoff escalated into a courtroom fight. After the city council refused to fund its Flock contract, the mayor declared a state of emergency, and the council responded by suing over that move. The dispute now centers on a basic question, how long a city should be allowed to hold onto footage of its own residents driving down the street.
New York isn’t alone in seeing this spill into court. In Huntington, West Virginia, a resident sued the city days after officials approved a $2.1 million Flock contract behind closed doors, following a marathon council meeting where more than 50 people spoke out against the technology and protesters circled City Hall.
Aubrey Sparks, legal director of the ACLU of West Virginia, argued the deal shouldn’t have gone through in the first place.
“The legal issues with this contract are numerous, but we are starting with how it was awarded in the first place. Simply put, the city acted hastily and did not follow its own laws when approving this contract, so it should be considered null and void from the start,” Sparks said.
Her colleague, ACLU-WV executive director Eli Baumwell, went further, accusing city officials of working around their own constituents.
“As other towns and cities are waking up to the egregious abuses of this technology, Huntington officials worked behind closed doors for months to thwart the will of their constituents and push this invasive surveillance on the city. We will not stand by while the city runs roughshod over the will of the people and the privacy rights of every person in Huntington,” Baumwell said.
Underlying all of it is a real uncertainty over who can actually access the data, an uncertainty serious enough to spawn its own watchdog tool, Have I Been Flocked.maps.deflock.org
The cameras themselves are simple. Solar powered and bolted onto poles at entrances, exits and other high traffic spots, they photograph every passing vehicle and run the plate through image recognition software, logging the make, model, color and any distinguishing features along with a timestamp. That data feeds into a searchable, cloud-based system that flags vehicles tied to a “hot list,” things like stolen cars or plates linked to a police investigation.
HOAs typically own their own footage, but once a board opts into data sharing, the same records can become visible to thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide, not just the local department that installed the cameras. Retention windows vary by contract, often 30 days or more, and critics say oversight of who actually searches that data is thin to nonexistent.
That lack of oversight is exactly what set off residents in Saranac Lake, where critics argued access to the system stretched well beyond police.
Placement has become its own flashpoint. Flock markets the cameras as a license plate tool for roads and entrances, but residents have pointed out the cameras keep turning up somewhere else entirely, aimed at swimming pools, parks and courts where no car could ever pass. If the only job is reading plates on moving vehicles, that raises an obvious question about why a lens would be pointed at a pool deck instead of a driveway.
For homebuyers, none of this is abstract anymore. More than 200 homeowners associations nationwide have signed on with Flock, often funded straight out of resident dues and frequently without ever putting it to a vote. Boards pitch the cameras as neighborhood security. Buyers increasingly see them as a liability baked into the price of the house, one more line item to weigh alongside the roof and the HVAC.
With HOA disclosure paperwork rarely mentioning surveillance contracts at all, brokers are increasingly getting blindsided by a due-diligence step that barely existed two years ago.Christopher Sadowski for NY Post
A wave of buyers nationwide are pulling up crowdsourced surveillance maps before they’ll even walk through a listing, and what they’re finding at HOA-run communities is turning would-be sales into no-shows.
The clearest example ricocheted across social media after a broker, posting in a Reddit forum for real estate agents, described watching a deal fall apart in real time.
“Just had a buyer cancel a showing because HOA has Flock cameras at both entrances, including one by the pool,” the broker wrote.
The post exploded well past its intended audience.
“Yes, this is true. I’m the broker. I scheduled a showing and buyers cancelled because they brought this to my attention,” the broker wrote in an edit. “I was originally asking Realtors (In a sub for Realtors) if they have experienced this. I was not anticipating 500 comments from non agents. But thank you for your input.”
Standard HOA disclosure paperwork almost never mentions surveillance contracts at all, leaving buyers to do their own digging on crowdsourced tools like DeFlock before they’ll even book a tour.
Long-blightedBaltimorehas a blooming new future in store.
Thousands of vacant homes within the city, which for years stood as eyesores and scared investors away, are now seeing a stunning moment in the spotlight thanks to big buyer demand and bidding wars, the Wall Street Journal reports. And while not every city neighborhood is seeing such success, the activity is helping Baltimore see a notable vacancy reduction — nearly a third — over the last decade.
Not only are the city and Maryland showering Baltimore with billions of dollars in funding, but nonprofits are also rehabbing full blocks at once — all while violent crime makes historic drops.
For decades, Baltimore dealt with ongoing issues surrounding vacant housing.AP
Still, the languishing affordability crisis is making Americans in pricier cities have a look at Baltimore. It doesn’t hurt that the city’s median sale price is $235,333, according to Zillow data, well below the $381,333 national median.
Alex Queen, a Baltimore native, left Los Angeles after repeatedly losing out on California homes in bidding wars. She and her family ultimately bought a vacant property that had been rehabbed by Parity Homes, a nonprofit developer.
Similarly, Alex Kovach and Ella Miller purchased a home in East Baltimore’s Johnston Square, where a nonprofit developer, ReBUILD Metro, has made big strides reducing the sum of vacant properties. It’s close to downtown Baltimore and transportation options.
“Johnston Square is at the perfect location,” Kovach told the Journal.
Buyers like these are helping the city mark massive milestones. For many years, the city saw vacant homes hit a stagnant high of 16,000. That number has since lowered to less than 12,000.
“Vacant housing was everywhere,” Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, told the Journal. “When people see a bunch of vacants, no one wants to live there. No one wants to invest there.”
The city has also seen historic drops in violent crime.Bloomberg via Getty Images
The recent activity traces its origins to the COVID years, when low interest rates lured in buyers, helping prices grow and renovations become more doable. Then people from pricier areas, namely Washington, DC, began eyeing Baltimore as a more affordable alternative.
Now, more than ever, investors are swooping in. Plumber and part-time investor Chris Waldron had to raise his auction bid to $45,000 for a vacant property with boarded-up windows and a peeling facade — after competitors doubled what he wanted to shell out.
“What did I get myself into?” Waldron told the outlet of his thoughts when he visited the property after winning the sale. But then he figured out his plan — flush it with $130,000 for a five-month renovation before selling it for more than $300,000.
Not every neighborhood benefits currently. For instance, Carrollton Ridge — home to some of the worst homicide rates in Baltimore — has 750 vacant homes, 40 more than it had a decade ago.
Elsewhere, the change is hard to believe, locals said. In Johnston Square, the purchase activity has made a community garden replace a drug market, while formerly vacant blocks are now home to families.
“There was nothing but rows and rows of boarded-up houses,” longtime neighborhood resident Regina Hammond told the Journal. “Now it’s a whole different story.”
