Evergrande wants to get approval for its plans to restructure by the beginning of next year.

Asian Trade TVNovember 28, 2022

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China Evergrande Group’s lawyers said on Monday that the company hopes to get creditors’ approval for its plans to restructure its debt as soon as the end of February.

Evergrande was once the best-selling developer in China, but now it is in the middle of the country’s property crisis. Its $22.7 billion in offshore debt, which includes loans and private bonds, is considered to be in default because it missed payments at the end of last year.

Evergrande, which owes a total of $300 billion and is running out of ways to get money, started one of China’s biggest debt restructuring processes this year.

Related: Evergrande wants to use onshore assets as a sweetener for reorganising its offshore debt.

Evergrande’s lawyers told a Hong Kong court that debt-restructuring plans should be finalized by the end of February or the beginning of March. The court then put off a winding-up lawsuit against the developer until March 20, 2023.

Reuters said earlier this month that a source with knowledge of the situation said that Evergrande would sign non-disclosure agreements with bondholders in November to get ready for negotiations in December. The terms would be finalized early next year.

In June, an investor in Evergrande unit Fangchebao, an online marketplace for real estate and cars, filed a petition to shut down the troubled property developer because it had broken a promise to buy back shares the investor had bought in FCB.

Evergrande and its main offshore credit group have spoken out against the winding-up petition, saying that the developer was actively moving forward with the offshore debt restructuring work because it was in the best interest of all creditors.

A lawyer for the petitioner said that Evergrande hasn’t included his client in the talks about restructuring, and they don’t know anything about the process. Evergrande’s lawyer said that the company plans to come up with a plan before telling all of the creditors about it.

During the hearing on Monday, judge Linda Chan said that Evergrande would need to tell the next hearing “something much more concrete” about how it plans to fix its debt. She told Evergrande to send a report on how the restructuring process was going 14 days before the next hearing.

Sources have told Reuters that Evergrande is thinking about using domestic assets and offering them as additional credit enhancement to get approval from offshore creditors as part of the options being looked at for the restructuring proposal.

Offshore, creditors have taken over its biggest assets in Hong Kong.

In a public filing on Saturday, it was shown that a state-backed company in Shenzhen bought a piece of land owned by Evergrande for 7.5 billion yuan ($1.04 billion). This could put a damper on Evergrande’s plan to use onshore assets as incentives for bondholders.

Reuters said that Evergrande bought the land for 5.6 billion yuan in 2017 and planned to turn it into the group’s headquarters.