Lenders to the office tower appointed receiver Alvarez and Marsal in September to seize the asset, filings at Hong Kong’s Companies Registry and Land Registry showed, as the world’s most indebted developer struggles to emerge from its debt crisis.
The tower had been pledged for a HK$7.6 billion loan from lenders led by the Hong Kong subsidiary of Chinese state-owned China Citic Bank.
Reuters reported in July that Evergrande was looking to sell the tower via tender, but there were only a couple of bids and the offers were below HK$10 billion and its 2015 HK$12.5 billion purchase price.
Major Hong Kong developer CK Asset, founded by billionaire Li Ka-shing, said at the time it had submitted a bid for the building.
While names of the potential buyers in the latest round were not immediately known, many of them have signed non-disclosure pacts, said Godfrey Cheng, deputy senior director at Savills Hong Kong, which has been hired to dispose of the asset.
The building is now valued at between HK$8 billion and HK$9 billion, Cheng said.
That would leave very little for Evergrande creditors, who hold US$22.5 billion worth of the developer’s offshore debt, given HK$7.6 billion is owed to Citic.
The sale, one of Evergrande’s few offshore assets, is also happening against the backdrop of the office real estate market in Hong Kong seeing prices dropping 30 per cent in the past three years.
Evergrande’s other asset outside the mainland – a large plot of land in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long district – was seized by US asset manager Oaktree Capital Management earlier this year.