Hong kong. Mingling with power brokers at the Chinese Communist Party's centenary celebrations in 2021, a beaming Hui Ka Yan betrayed no sign of the pressure mounting on his property company, China Evergrande Group, the world's most-indebted developer.
Hui, with a full head of black hair, looked relaxed in a navy-blue suit and open-necked shirt as he stood on a podium overlooking the festivities in Tiananmen Square, an invitation many considered an official show of support for the billionaire businessman.
Five years later, on Thursday, a grey-haired Hui, once Asia's richest man, wore a navy-blue collared shirt and was flanked by two officers as a court in the southern city of Shenzhen read out his sentence of life in prison.
Rags to riches to life in prison
Evergrande, the company he founded that grew to be China's premier developer, defaulted on its overseas debts months after Hui stood at the Communist Party celebrations in Beijing and later and went into liquidation, its collapse symbolising a property crisis that continues to weigh on the world's second-biggest economy.
