By Jiahui Huang and Ben Otto


China Evergrande Group is dropping efforts in the U.S. to restructure billions of dollars in offshore debt, coming almost two months after a Hong Kong court ordered the heavily indebted developer to liquidate.

Evergrande, once China's biggest property developer by sales, has moved to withdraw offshore debt restructuring applications filed to a U.S. court, it said in a filing to Hong Kong's stock exchange late Sunday. Two units that act as Evergrande's main overseas financing platforms have done the same, it said.

Guangzhou-based Evergrande and its units had sought a New York court's approval last August to restructure more than $19 billion in offshore debt via Chapter 15 bankruptcy filings. In January, a Hong Kong court ordered the group to liquidate, bringing an end to a yearslong saga of missed payments and restructuring talks that rippled through the world's second largest economy.

Evergrande said Sunday that liquidators are focused on preserving and returning value to creditors and other stakeholders, and that "at this stage, all options remain open for consideration." It added that liquidators could make new Chapter 15 filings in the future.

Evergrande defaulted on dollar bonds in 2021 after running up liabilities of more than $300 billion, helping spark a broader property crisis in China. The company's woes were partly a product of Beijing's crackdown on financial risk in the property sector, which led to a sharp drop in home sales and shut some developers out of debt markets.

Last week, Evergrande's main operating vehicle inside China, Hengda Real Estate, said the group is facing a fine of more than half a billion dollars after Chinese regulators found the unit had fraudulently boosted sales and profit in the years before Evergrande's collapse. Hengda said China's securities regulator is also banning Evergrande's founder and former chairman, Hui Ka Yan, from the financial markets for life.


Write to Jiahui Huang at jiahui.huang@wsj.com and Ben Otto at ben.otto@wsj.com


(END) Dow Jones Newswires

03-25-24 0342ET