Hui Ka Yan was once one of the world's richest men, a property tycoon who used his company's billions to buy a soccer club and fund medical research at Harvard University.

On Thursday, a court in China told Hui that he would spend the rest of his life in prison after the nation's property bust led to the collapse of his China Evergrande Group.

The court in Shenzhen found Hui, 67, and Evergrande entities carried out sustained and large-scale financial fraud between 2016 and 2021 to inflate assets and hide liabilities, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

Those were the years when Hui was promising to build more than a million housing units across China, while the group he founded in 1996 amassed liabilities that at one point topped the equivalent of $300 billion.

Hui, who pleaded guilty to the charges in April, was ordered to forfeit all of his personal assets. Evergrande and its flagship property unit were collectively fined the equivalent of more than $2 billion, Xinhua said. The court said authorities would continue seeking to recover Hui's illegal gains.

Evergrande's growth machine was fueled by a simple cycle: borrow, buy land, presell apartments and borrow again. For years, rising home prices and seemingly endless demand in China made the business model look unassailable.

At its peak, Evergrande was far more than a property developer. Hui expanded into soccer, bottled water endorsed by actor Jackie Chan, electric vehicles and finance. In 2010, Evergrande bought Guangzhou's soccer club and poured money into building a team that won the Asian Champions League in 2013.

Hui donated money to Harvard University medical research and toured the campus in 2018 with Harvard's then-president. The university named an immunology center after Evergrande and called Hui a "generous supporter" in 2020 when he was offering to fund Covid-19 research.

But the pandemic proved to be the trigger for an economic slowdown that led Evergrande to unravel, leaving hundreds of thousands of units unfinished and angry customers who couldn't get their deposits back.

Evergrande defaulted on some debt in late 2021 and was ordered into liquidation by a Hong Kong court in January 2024.

The property bust symbolized by Evergrande continues to drag down China's economy, years after the company's demise, and the real-estate market still hasn't hit bottom. Property investment in China in the first seven months of this year fell 19% compared with the same period a year earlier.