A Hong Kong court has ordered the liquidation of the world’s most indebted property developer – China Evergrande – after it failed to strike a deal with its creditors to restructure. It’s a ruling with significant legal ramifications and is likely to jolt China’s already fragile property market. 


Tsim Sha Tsui

Hong Kong court orders liquidation of China Evergrande

The Hong Kong court ruling opens up an unpredictable new phase in the collapse of Evergrande. Foreign creditors filed the petition a year and a half ago to force the world's most indebted property developer into liquidation and try to recoup some of their losses. Evergrande was repeatedly given additional time to come up with a restructuring proposal, but it failed to materialize and the High Court says enough is enough. It's been a very long and drawn out restructuring and so an enormous amount of value has already been destroyed for the bondholders. The case now faces major jurisdictional challenges. In cases like these, foreign creditors prefer to go through Hong Kong courts because of the common law system and because of the lack of transparency in legal process on mainland China. But liquidators have no power to enforce the order from Hong Kong courts on the mainland. So all they can do is try to attempt to grab assets and sell assets that are offshore. But the majority of the value in this case is onshore in China. So there's very little they can do. Analysts say creditors are likely to recover less than 5% of their investment. And an estimated 1.5 million people in China are left with unfinished homes, posing a serious risk of social instability. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators are shoring up support for other struggling developers and making it easier to access loans as part of efforts to stem a major market rout. It's unclear whether the measures will have a sustained effect. At the end of the day, it still comes down to the implementation of the commercial banks and financial institutions in China. Some of the distressed developers have not timely received the credit support, whereas all the additional liquidity is rejected to the state-owned developers. Chinese developers still face the problem of sluggish consumer demand. The latest data shows house prices in December fell the most in nearly nine years. But analysts say Evergrande's fate shows authorities are determined to bring under control the property market bubble. Patrick Fock, Al Jazeera, Hong Kong.

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