On August 20, 2026, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Hui Ka Yan – also known as Xu Jiayin, founder and former chairman of China Evergrande Group – to life imprisonment. The public verdict also imposed lifelong deprivation of political rights and confiscation of his personal property, according to China’s state news agency Xinhua. Reuters reported that Evergrande itself was fined 8.82 billion yuan, while its main subsidiary Hengda Real Estate was fined 7 billion yuan. Those corporate penalties should not be presented as fines personally imposed on Hui.
The Swedish outlet Carup framed the verdict through the former Saab factory: the man who was supposed to save it had received life in prison. That headline supplies a compelling Saab connection, but it also compresses several different companies, trademarks and property transactions into one sentence. Hui did not buy Saab Automobile in 2019, and the criminal verdict does not name NEVS or Trollhättan. His relevance to Saab history comes from his control of NEVS, the post-bankruptcy company that occupied Saab’s former industrial base.
First distinction: Evergrande bought NEVS, not Saab
NEVS acquired core assets and intellectual property from the Saab Automobile bankruptcy estate in 2012. It did not acquire unrestricted ownership of the Saab name. A separate 2012 licensing agreement with Saab AB initially allowed NEVS to use the name on future electric cars, but not the griffin symbol. After NEVS entered creditor protection in 2014, Saab AB withdrew that permission. In 2016, NEVS confirmed that future products would use the NEVS identity. Saab AB’s own history of the automobile business records Saab Automobile’s 2011 bankruptcy as the end of the original car company.
That distinction matters because the phrase ‘Evergrande bought Saab’ is legally and historically wrong. What Evergrande obtained was still valuable: NEVS, the Phoenix-related intellectual property it controlled, a large engineering organization, production assets and access to the former Saab facilities in Trollhättan. It bought Saab’s industrial successor, not the Saab marque.
The $930 million entry and the path to complete control
On January 15, 2019, an Evergrande subsidiary acquired 51 percent of NEVS for $930 million and obtained control of a majority of its board seats. The figure and governance change appear in Evergrande’s 2018 annual-results announcement filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Evergrande increased its holding to 82.4 percent by November 2019, then agreed on June 10, 2020 to acquire the remaining 17.6 percent. A later HKEX filing confirms that NEVS became a wholly owned subsidiary.
The scale of Evergrande’s EV statements encouraged observers to read Trollhättan into every announcement. The actual targets were group-wide. In October 2021, Reuters reported that Hui wanted Evergrande NEV to sell one million EVs annually by 2025, that 14 models had been announced, and that the group planned ten factories across China and Sweden. That was not a published commitment to build one million vehicles at Stallbacka, nor evidence that a new Saab-badged production program had been approved.
The production event closest to the familiar Saab 9-3 occurred elsewhere. On June 29, 2019, NEVS launched production of its battery-electric 9-3 derivative at the Tianjin plant in China. The car preserved the basic 9-3 silhouette and part of its engineering lineage, but it carried NEVS branding and was assembled for the Chinese market. For Trollhättan, the more important result of Evergrande’s money was not that sedan. It was a secret clean-sheet program.
Emily GT was the real Trollhättan achievement of the Evergrande years
The NEVS Emily GT project began in December 2019, months after Evergrande took control. It remained confidential until 2023. By then, the company that funded it was already failing, but the prototypes demonstrated that Trollhättan’s engineering organization had not been reduced to maintaining an old 9-3 platform.
According to Top Gear’s detailed report, roughly 350 engineers and technicians worked on Emily. The team moved from a blank sheet to driving cars in about ten months. Twenty prototypes had been planned, but pandemic disruption limited the fleet to six. The reported configuration used a 175-kWh battery and four 121-hp in-wheel motors, with a separate higher-output version under consideration. The technical case was not a nostalgic rebadging exercise: torque vectoring, wheel-motor control, packaging and long-range battery integration were central to the program.
Emily therefore prevents an overly simple reading of the Evergrande period. The investment did finance real work in Trollhättan, and the engineers delivered functioning vehicles. What failed was the route from prototype engineering to industrial production. No funded launch, homologation program, supplier ramp-up or sales network followed. When Emily was finally shown publicly in 2023, NEVS was presenting it primarily as an asset that might attract a buyer.
The retreat reached Trollhättan before Hui’s arrest
The first clear contraction inside NEVS came in August 2021. SVT reported that the company had notified 300 employees of possible layoffs from a Trollhättan workforce of about 650. Union representatives explicitly connected the uncertainty to the owner’s financial problems. By October, NEVS was telling Reuters that it was speaking with US and European investors about new ownership.
The next cut was decisive. On February 23, 2023, NEVS entered what it called hibernation mode. This was not a reduction from roughly 800 people, as some later summaries have stated. The contemporaneous SVT report gives the relevant numbers: 320 of the remaining 340 employees were notified. Hui was placed under investigation in China later that year, but the operational damage in Trollhättan was already visible before his detention became the dominant international story.
How the former Saab factory property left NEVS ownership
The factory story also requires more precision than the shorthand ‘Stenhaga bought Saab.’ In 2023, NEVS sold an 80 percent interest in AB Trollhättan Propellern 13, the company holding the main Stallbacka property, to Logistikfastigheter i Trollhättan AB, a Swedish buyer associated with the Stenhaga property group. NEVS retained 20 percent, preserving at least a corporate connection to the site while Emily and PONS were being offered to investors.
The final disposal did not occur in September 2024. An Evergrande NEV filing says NEVS proceeded with the sale of its remaining 20 percent on November 25, 2024. Reuters reported a price of SEK 60 million, about $5.63 million at the time, and identified Logistikfastigheter i Trollhättan AB as the buyer. The exchange filing also records disagreement from an independent director over the transaction and a 50 percent discount applied to related promissory notes.
The defensible conclusion is narrower than the earlier draft: the main former Saab property passed completely out of NEVS ownership in November 2024. It should not be described as having become the sole property of Stenhaga in September, because the legal buyer and the closing date are documented differently. By the time of Hui’s August 2026 sentence, approximately 21 months had passed since the final 20 percent left NEVS.
The last employees left, but NEVS did not instantly disappear
On December 11, 2024, the remaining 20 NEVS employees received layoff notices. The announcement was severe, but CEO Nina Selander did not declare that the legal entity had ceased to exist. As the TT report carried by Sweden Herald recorded, she said the company would continue trying to sell Emily and PONS and that the ‘final nail in the coffin’ had not yet been hammered in. Notice periods and a small residual team meant that several people continued handling the assets during 2025 and 2026.
NEVS cleared parts, prototype material and memorabilia during 2025, including the August sale during the Trollhättan Motor Festival. Yet the company still appeared publicly in 2026 through Selander and the effort to find buyers for its remaining projects. It is therefore safer to describe NEVS as stripped down, without a workforce capable of vehicle development or production, rather than to state that it had already been legally wound up.
Seven cars, not eight: the final factory auction
The most visible closing event came on May 30, 2026. Klaravik’s official auction page listed exactly seven vehicles: three 2014 Saab 9-3 pre-production cars and four NEVS vehicles. The NEVS group included a drivable electric 9-3 and three development cars: a pre-production prototype, an autonomous-driving prototype and a range-extender prototype. The Hengchi 5 shown in some later coverage was not part of Klaravik’s official seven-car result list and should not be folded into that total.
According to Klaravik’s results release, the seven vehicles produced a combined SEK 1.035 million, roughly $97,000. The 2018 NEVS 9-3 electric car brought the highest bid at SEK 252,000, about $23,500. Three Saab-badged pre-production cars sold for SEK 142,000, SEK 159,000 and SEK 177,000. Every buyer was Swedish. Those numbers are more reliable than the earlier total of SEK 1,031,000 because they come from the auctioneer’s final release.
