China Levies Record Penalty on PwC Over Evergrande Fraud (3)

China suspended the operations of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP for six months and imposed a record penalty over lapses in its auditing of China Evergrande Group.

The accounting firm was fined 441 million yuan ($62 million) for its auditing work on Evergrande’s inflated financial reports from 2018 to 2020, statements by the Ministry of Finance and the China Securities Regulatory Commission showed Friday. The regulator also ordered the closure of PwC’s branch in Guangzhou.

PwC has been under the spotlight after China launched one of the biggest investigations of financial fraud in history. Authorities have said developer Evergrande’s main onshore unit ...