Evergrande's Liquidators Count the Cost: 13 Billion Hong Kong Dollars for Picassos Stored in a Supply Room
A new report from the failed developer's liquidators details how China Evergrande spent 13 billion Hong Kong dollars on 110 works by Picasso, Monet and Warhol — then stacked them in a company supply room. Nearly all have since been auctioned, at a loss of more than ten billion.
The clearest picture yet of where China Evergrande's money went arrived this week not as an exposé but as a liquidator's progress report. The failed developer's court-appointed liquidators filed their second progress report covering the period to September 2026, and its accounting of two lines of spending — art and academia — has been widely shared and hotly argued across the Chinese internet.
The art came first in scale. Over eighteen months, a company subsidiary spent about 13 billion Hong Kong dollars acquiring 110 works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol and other blue-chip names. According to the report, the paintings were never properly stored: they were stacked in the storage rooms of the company's Hong Kong headquarters. Of the 110, 96 have since been sold through Sotheby's — recovering a little over 2.25 billion Hong Kong dollars, a loss of more than ten billion on the collection alone.
The second line item is a donation of roughly 12 billion Hong Kong dollars to Harvard University, made across two gifts in 2013 and 2016 to endow a named research center. The liquidators, who are chasing assets on behalf of creditors owed an estimated 360 billion Hong Kong dollars across 200 claims, note they can find no clear commercial benefit to the company from the gift. They have sued the company's founder, Hui Ka Yan, and others for the recovery of more than 6.5 billion US dollars, while conceding that recovery across borders — from a company emptied over years, and from assets dispersed abroad — is slow, uncertain work.
The contrast the posts drew, and the reason the report traveled, is the obvious one. Evergrande's collapse left homebuyers, suppliers and wealth-management investors owed sums the report itself sizes in the hundreds of billions. A filing that shows the same company's money buying impressionist masterpieces and endowing an American university reads, to those creditors, as a map of where it went.
There is a sliver of working capital news buried in the report: the liquidators have signed an exclusivity agreement with a potential buyer for Evergrande Property Management, the one healthy business in the wreckage, with talks to conclude by October 27. Realized assets so far total only about 3.4 billion Hong Kong dollars — a rounding error against the claims.
The report does not say what became of the remaining fourteen artworks. Presumably they are still in the storeroom.