许家印被判无期。恒大留下一百六十二万套没盖完的房子，还有七十万套空着。

Remember a number first: 1.62 million apartments, never finished.

Behind one apartment stands one family; behind 1.62 million stand more than six million people.

They have one thing in common: the money was paid long ago.

Buying a home in China usually means buying off-plan: the building is still going up, you hand over the money, wait a year or two, then collect the keys.

That system turns on one thing only: you believe this company will finish the building.

Evergrande was the largest property developer in China at the time, and Hui Ka Yan had once been the richest man in the country.

Then the building stopped.

Where did the money go?

The period the court established runs from 2016 to 2021.

Across those five years the accounts did two things: where there were assets they were written larger — inflation; where there were debts they were written smaller — concealment.

As long as the numbers looked good the credit rating held, money could keep being borrowed, and off-plan flats could keep being sold.

So this was not a single lie. It was a machine that had to keep turning: borrow new money to build old towers, sell new towers to repay old debt.

In 2021, the machine came apart.

On the twentieth of August this year, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court delivered its first-instance verdict in open court.

Evergrande Group, fined 8.82 billion yuan; Evergrande Real Estate, fined 7 billion.

Hui Ka Yan himself: life imprisonment, lifetime deprivation of political rights, and confiscation of all personal property.

The eight charges come down to three things: taking people’s money, falsifying the books, and moving company money into his own hands.

The news usually ends here; but for those six million people, nothing has ended.

Through the delivery programme more than 800,000 units have been completed and handed over these past years; the remaining 700,000 still stand empty.

Plenty of those buyers are still paying a monthly mortgage — on an apartment they have never once walked into.

The verdict deals with the past: who took the money, who is responsible. But what these people need is the future: when does that door open.

A court can sentence a man to life imprisonment. It cannot produce an apartment.

So the real ending is not in the courtroom. It is behind those 700,000 doors that have never been closed.

Think about it:

You paid first and the thing never arrives. How long would you wait?