Evergrande founder sells 9% of his stock to face debt by EFE

Beijing, November 28 (EFE). The founder of debt-laden Chinese real estate giant Evergande, Xu Jiayin, has sold 9% of his shares in the company for $344 million (303.9 million euros), in a fresh bid for cash to meet the company’s obligations, local media reported today.

Xu sold 1.2 trillion shares of Evergrande (HK 🙂 averaged HK$2.23 ($0.29, €0.25) on the Hong Kong stock exchange last Thursday, 20% below the price at which shares closed the day before, according to private Caixin digital newspaper. .

The newspaper said that this is the first time that a CEO has reduced his stake in the company since it began trading in 2009. With this sale, its founder’s stake in Evergrande becomes 67.8%, compared to 76, 9% before the operation. .

Before disposing of a portion of his stock, the millionaire, even four years ago the richest man in China, had already injected nearly $1,100 million after selling personal assets or shares to keep the company afloat.

The company must bear a liability exceeding 300 thousand million dollars, of which about 37 thousand million debts are due to be paid before the end of the first half of 2022.

This month, the group also announced the sale of its stake in streaming platform Hengten for HK$2,128 million ($273 million, €241 million).

In recent weeks, Evergrande has been on the verge of defaulting on its offshore bonds several times, and has entered into an extension to repay its investors after not doing so on the agreed date, although it has not definitively defaulted on any of its obligations.

Chinese authorities have already indicated that the priority is for Evergrande and other struggling developers to finish building projects that have been crippled by a lack of funds, in part due to funding restrictions that Beijing has imposed since last year on real estate companies. More indebtedness.

The authorities of the city of Canton (southeast), this week, the Evergrande company withdrew the license for the land in which it was building a large stadium for the football team, which would have been the largest in the world built specifically for this sport, with a capacity. 100,000 viewers and an estimated cost of about 12,000 million yuan ($1,878 million, €1,675 million).