Evergrande can't raise new debt due to Hengda probe

China Evergrande (3333) yesterday said it cannot currently issue new debt due to an ongoing investigation of its subsidiary Hengda Real Estate.

Evergrande can't meet the China Securities Regulatory Commission's "measures for overseas securities offering and listing by domestic firms" as well as "measures for approval of mid-to-long term foreign debt of the National Development and Reform Commission."

Therefore, it can't issue new notes, the group said.

Meanwhile, even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market.

"How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people," said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau. "That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them," He said at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan.

As of August, the total floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square meters, data from the National Bureau of Statistics show. However, it does not count projects that have already been sold but not yet completed, or the homes purchased by speculators in the last market upturn in 2016 that remain vacant, which together make up the bulk of unused space, says experts.