Hong Kong (Reuters) – The website for the Hong Kong high court showed that a petition to close down the troubled property developer China Evergrande Group had been filed.
The website says that “Top Shine Global Limited of Intershore Consult (Samoa) Limited” filed the petition, and on August 31 there will be a hearing.
When asked to comment on the petition, Evergrande didn’t do so right away.
Evergrande owes more than $300 billion. At the end of last year, it stopped making payments on its offshore debt, so it is now considered to be in default.
State-owned companies have stepped in to help restructure the debt and have taken over some of the company’s assets to ease market worries about a chaotic collapse.
By the end of July, the company should have announced a rough plan for reorganising.
The U.S. asset manager, Oaktree Capital Management, was a lender to Evergrande for the development of a large plot of land in the rural Hong Kong district of Yuen Long. At the beginning of this year, Oaktree tried to take control of the land by putting a receiver in charge of it.
In a filing at the time, Evergrande said that the appointment of receivers and possible sale of relevant secured assets “would not have a material effect on the group’s operations or financial position, nor would it affect the group’s ongoing debt restructuring exercise.”
Someone who knew about the situation told Reuters that the developer would keep trying to sell the undeveloped land even after a receiver was named.
