A mansion at one of Hong Kong’s most exclusive neighbourhoods found its buyer after a fire sale and 15 months on the auction block, offering a minor victory for China Evergrande Group’s liquidators as they grapple to sell the defunct developer’s assets.
The buyer of the two-storey mansion, located near the Hong Kong Cricket Club and one of the island’s favourite trekking trails, was Sassicaia Company Limited, a privately owned company. The two directors of Sassicaia, registered in April, are the Singapore passport holder Lim Choi Hwee, and a Bermuda-registered company called Bartley Directors, which uses an agent in Hong Kong as its company secretary.
The property was put up for sale by receivers in March 2023 to recover unpaid bills after being seized by China Construction Bank (Asia) in November 2022. Along with two adjacent mansions 10C and 10E, the three properties were remortgaged in late 2021 for HK$1.1 billion, compared with their combined valuation of HK$1.5 billion.
The mansion’s previous owner was registered as Better Vision and its director Tan Haijun, according to a company registration search. Tan was the director of Giant Hill, which owned adjacent mansions 10C and 10E on Black’s Link, according to Land Registry data. Hui resigned as Giant Hill’s director on July 30, 2021, and his seat was filled on the same day by Tan, according to the records.
The chokehold brought Evergrande, one of China’s biggest developers by sales, to its knees. The company was ordered into liquidation by a Hong Kong court in January, marking the largest such case in the city.
In March, the China Securities Regulatory Commission fined Evergrande 4.2 billion yuan, saying that the group had inflated its sales by 564 billion yuan in the years preceding its eventual collapse. It also slapped the company’s founder, known as Xu Jiayin on the mainland, with a 47-million yuan penalty and a lifelong ban from accessing the capital markets. Six other current and former executives of the Guangzhou-based home builder were each slapped with penalties of between 200,000 yuan and 15 million yuan.
The 10E property on Black’s Link, a three-storey detached house measuring 4,933 sq ft and an estimated market value of HK$550 million, was put up for sale by public tender in March. Savills, the agent responsible for the sale, invited tenders for the property, which closed on April 22.