It is late November 2017 and Steinhoff, already Europe’s second-largest furniture retailer after Ikea, is scrambling to convince its auditor Deloitte to sign off its accounts for the year to September, due to be published a week later, on December 6.
Deloitte has been warned. A few months earlier, its Dutch office was handed documents that spelled out an epic swindle in Steinhoff’s accounts, euphemistically described as “potential noncompliance with laws” and masterminded by its bombastic CEO, Markus Jooste.
Nervous of his firm’s own reputation, Deloitte partner Patrick Seinstra asks Jooste repeatedly for proof of several transactions but, as Seinstra says in an email to him on November 5, it received “mostly verbal explanations rather than audit evidence”.
Jooste keeps stalling, so on November 26, Deloitte gives a 15-slide presentation to Steve Booysen, the chair of Steinhoff’s audit committee, in which it warns of a “lack of economic substance” in some deals and “substantial” holes in the accounts. It warns that unless it gets proof of several so-called deals, it will not sign off the year-end accounts.
In the most blatant example of these “irregularities”, Deloitte flags the fact that in each of the previous four years, Steinhoff has included vast “one-off” sums in its profits after its September year-end, each of which has radically changed the complexion of its finances.
It’s no different this time. For September 2017, Jooste wants Deloitte to sign off on accounts that put its profit at €2.4bn, a third of which comes courtesy of a murky deal with the world’s largest mattress company, Serta Simmons, based in the US.
Supposedly, Serta Simmons agreed to pay $200m to Steinhoff through an entity named Tulett as a “reimbursement of marketing costs”, as well as €557m for buying Steinhoff’s brands, after its year-end.
Deloitte smells a rat. Where is the “signed reimbursement agreement” for the $200m, it asks. And on that point, where is the “sale and purchase” deal for the brands, or even a valuation report?
Jooste goes on the offensive. In the weeks before, he had convinced Steinhoff’s board to send a letter to Deloitte stating that all these allegations stem from a disgruntled former partner, Andreas Seifert, who is “using Deloitte and others as a tool in his litigation strategy”. A renowned bully, Jooste loudly discusses how Deloitte is now scared of its own shadow.
In one email, he writes to a colleague despairing about Deloitte wanting more and more documents: “Sorry for the hassles, but this world has gone crazy with compliance.”
Deloitte, however, stands firm.
At a high-octane meeting in late November, Deloitte tells Steinhoff’s chair, Christo Wiese, that the company’s management — read: Jooste — has been defrauding the company for years to the tune of more than €6bn. “You can imagine how this hits you when an auditor says that to a client,” Wiese recalled.
So, he calls in Jooste and says to him: “In simple terms, they are calling you a crook. They say you defrauded the company over a period of years.” Jooste “did not blink an eyelid”.
Jooste, cool as ice, gives the auditors what Wiese says is “a perfectly correct explanation”. But Deloitte sticks to its guns: unless we get the evidence, we’re not signing.
Finally, on Friday December 1, Jooste gives a “big speech” about going to Germany to obtain the documents for the Serta Simmons deal and jets off. Unknown to anyone, Jooste had always planned to travel to Germany that weekend to give a speech at the 80th birthday party of Bruno Steinhoff, who fatefully threw in his lot with Jooste in 1998.
On Monday December 4, Jooste arrives back in South Africa and calls Wiese. “I’ve got all the documents. I’m just having a shower and I’ll see you in a few hours,” he says.
Famously, Jooste does not arrive.
That evening, Jooste’s lawyer calls Wiese and tells him that the CEO “has broken down, crying, threatening suicide, and saying ‘I have made terrible mistakes, but I am offering my resignation’”.
Steinhoff has no choice. It tells shareholders that it has found “accounting irregularities” and that it has hired PwC to do a forensic audit.
Jooste can’t sleep that night. At 4.32am on December 5 he sends a message to several friends apologising for “all the bad publicity I caused Steinhoff,” adding that “I made some big mistakes and have now caused financial loss to many innocent people”. Jooste says it is “time for me to move on and take the consequences of my behaviour like a man”.
For Steinhoff, it’s the beginning of the end. No investor likes even the merest sniff of fraud and so, as the JSE opens on December 6, Steinhoff’s stock implodes. Within days, R230bn of its value has vanished — an instant disaster for the firm that had until that point been a market darling. It was, as Wiese told PwC later, “a nightmare that you cannot imagine”.
‘Never seen this in 20 years’
This behind-the-scenes script of Steinhoff’s final days before the collapse that changed the country’s corporate landscape is just one revelation in PwC’s full 7 000-page forensic report. This is not something we’ve seen before. Steinhoff did release an 11-page summary in 2019, but it fought to keep the full report secret.
Finally, in December 2024, after a five-year legal tussle, Steinhoff lost its fight in the Supreme Court of Appeal, which meant that the Financial Mail and amaBhungane were given all 7 000 pages.
So, what does this report tell us that we don’t already know?
Well, the bare bones of the fraud had already emerged in that 11-page summary. PwC had confirmed Deloitte’s worst fears: that Steinhoff’s profits had been flattered by an epic €6.5bn in “fictitious and/or irregular transactions” over more than a decade. It also confirmed that it was Jooste, along with a group of accomplices close to him, who had masterminded this con.
But the full PwC report colours between the lines. It paints an alarming picture of how Jooste ran rings around Steinhoff’s superstar board, which included three PhDs in accounting, to construct the country’s biggest fraud yet. Squadrons of lawyers, auditors, directors, banks and regulators were no match for Jooste, who became, however, increasingly sloppy towards the end.
Craig Butters, one of the analysts who spotted holes in Steinhoff’s accounts many years before it collapsed, says the extent of the swindle, as detailed by PwC, is breathtaking. A central revelation is how Steinhoff’s board, as well as so many others at lower levels, facilitated this corruption either wittingly or as useful pawns and were handsomely rewarded for doing so.
“This is far more extensive than we’d thought, as individuals within Steinhoff processed these fictitious deals. Jooste’s strategy was evidently to buy loyalty, and it’s clear that worked well,” says Butters.
On the Serta Simmons deal, for instance, documents in the PwC report reveal that this was nothing less than an audacious con. The €740m that Jooste had wanted to shunt into Steinhoff’s 2017 year-end financials from that deal was a fiction. “Serta Simmons did not, directly or indirectly, agree to reimburse $200m to Steinhoff,” the mattress company’s controlling shareholder, Advent International, told PwC’s investigators in 2018.
As for the €557m deal in which Serta Simmons supposedly agreed to buy Steinhoff’s brands for use in North America, Advent says that neither it nor Serta Simmons “has any knowledge of this transaction”.
There are many alarming transactions chronicled by PwC, but while the earlier deals are more elaborate and less obviously crooked, the later ones — as with Serta Simmons — speak to Jooste’s growing recklessness and desperation to fill financial holes. PwC says that as time went on, “the trend of increasing profits with fictitious income continues and appears to become less sophisticated”.
This is evident in the most blatant con he pulled.
In November 2016, while on a plane, Jooste scribbled a handwritten invoice for €23.5m (R376m) and handed it to finance director Ben la Grange to “process” into Steinhoff’s accounts. Jooste told La Grange that a company named the TG Group owed this to Steinhoff as a “rebate” negotiated as part of a “buying group” of European retailers.
In reality there was no “buying group”, nor any sum of €23.5m.
La Grange then asked his financial managers to source an invoice from the TG Group to back up this transaction. This invoice duly appeared, but only because, PwC concludes, Jooste’s accomplices — including Steinhoff’s former company secretary Stéhan Grobler and its European CFO Dirk Schreiber — “created various documents [to form] the impression this was a legitimate transition”.
PwC painstakingly details, by interviewing managers down the line of command, how Steinhoff was able to transform a fake handwritten invoice into a R376m entry in its accounts.
In an interview with La Grange, PwC’s head of forensics Trevor White asks him whether he didn’t immediately see this invoice as fraudulent. La Grange replies: “No, I did not think it was fraudulent, otherwise I would have raised it. And the cash came in and there was the invoice.”
This astounds White, who says: “To be honest, in investigating this kind of stuff for 20 years, I have never seen a situation where a group CEO handwrites a document, when you are busy finalising your global results, just to increase profits.”
In PwC’s 2018 interview with Grobler, who has since been arrested and is due to go on trial for fraud this year, investigators grill him about his role in conjuring up the documents to back up this transaction. Take this exchange, for instance:
PwC: “Now, Stéhan, I mean, you are a lawyer … that is making up audit evidence; now that is the polite way of putting it. It is making up evidence to satisfy the auditors, because this was an issue that was being queried by the auditors. How do you think it looks?”
Grobler: “In hindsight, realising that the buying group that was explained to us and talked about on a number of occasions by Markus, was then clearly not real … and therefore, this was then a sham transaction.”
Asked who is party to this fake deal, Grobler names Jooste and Schreiber. When pressed, he adds: “I am clearly party to it, too.”
‘Plain stupid to put this into an email’
Jooste’s suicide in March last year, on the cliff paths of Hermanus, removed him from having to respond to PwC’s evidence in court. But the extent of the evidence collected by PwC, as well as admissions from his co-conspirators, make it clear the odds were heavily stacked against him.
Most damagingly, Jooste’s closest accomplice, Schreiber, turned against him, spilling the beans to PwC about the mechanics of the fraud. Schreiber, a grey-haired, bespectacled 54-year-old bookkeeper, seemed an unlikely villain. A graduate of the University of Göttingen in Germany, he had worked at Steinhoff for 17 years, climbing the ladder to become finance director of Steinhoff Europe.
PwC’s report includes dozens of email exchanges between Schreiber, Jooste and another conspirator, Steinhoff Europe’s former CEO Siegmar Schmidt, who resigned in 2011 but kept working with Jooste behind the scenes.
The emails show how Schreiber, desperate for affirmation from his boss, repeatedly bent the rules even as he implored Jooste to stop inserting fake numbers into the accounts, sensing that it was only a matter of time before they were found out.
In August 2015, for instance, Schreiber writes to Jooste, complaining that it costs “a lot of energy” to keep engineering the accounts to make the numbers look good, since it’s clear the actual business is doing badly, especially in Australia, the UK and Europe.
In the most revealing exchange, Schreiber tells Jooste there is a German investigation into whether Steinhoff cheated on its tax and that therefore he, Schreiber, lives with the possibility that he could be “collected” by the authorities. Schreiber was correct to be concerned. German prosecutors, tipped off that the accounts were false, had raided Steinhoff’s European headquarters in 2015.
“You have promised me a lot in the last years. Any signed letter will not help me personally. I’m as MD in Austria and Germany fully criminal liable. You can only take [over] the penalty and trust you that you will do here, that you promised,” Schreiber writes to Jooste in his broken English.
Jooste is furious and berates him. “To put these things on e-mail for the record is plain stupid and I have given you the advice before: ‘You must not write e-mails’ to anybody when you don’t agree and/or are emotional. Phone me in future if you need to discuss anything.”
Jooste adds that “all these South Africans that you are so derogatory about lately is the people who are your friends and that will look after your wife and children forever if you are not there”.
From 2014, the emails show how Jooste, Schreiber and Schmidt — along with accomplices in Europe — created fake journal entries in Steinhoff’s books to make it look as though money was coming in. They did this by reverse-engineering the accounts, deciding what sort of profit number was needed to match what Jooste promised investors, and working backwards to create a “transaction” using companies they secretly controlled in Europe, such as the Talgarth Group.
In October 2015, for instance, Schreiber sends Jooste an email titled “reverse accounting”, in which he frets that putting too high a value on Steinhoff’s European property arm, Hemisphere, may be too conspicuous. This was a common tactic used by the fraudsters since by artificially hiking the value of Hemisphere’s properties, Steinhoff could report higher asset values.
“The experience with Hemisphere i can not [sic] do a second time. The values are two time market value,” Schreiber says.
The emails reveal that while the two Germans, Schreiber and Schmidt, become increasingly anxious about being caught, Jooste doubles down on the fraud, eager to make Steinhoff’s accounts look profitable ahead of its listing in Frankfurt in December 2015. “I have told you that Steinhoff will not list before all the baggage of the past have been cleaned out,” he writes to Schreiber in one email. He promises to personally take care of any fines that Schreiber might face from the tax investigation.
In August 2014, in a discussion on how to ensure Steinhoff’s European business can show a profit — and what entries must be concocted to make this happen — Schmidt warns Jooste that the auditors will not accept “additional entries without any proper documentation”.
Jooste says that of course documentation is needed, even as he leans on them to create it.
But the tensions are evident. The two Germans complain bitterly to each other about Jooste, saying that this financial result “in the current market, being overstated as in the past, brings nothing”.
By January 2016, Schmidt has had enough. He emails Jooste to tell him that the criminal authorities in Austria are now probing him for possible tax evasion. “Markus, I am now over and out … you must please find somebody who can take over immediately the accounting of those entities. Normally I would fly to Vienna coming Monday to do the accounting for December [but] I do not want to be arrested when I cross the German border.”
The emails are voluminous and damning and so it is no surprise that, as soon as PwC comes knocking, Schreiber comes clean.
In his first interview with PwC’s forensic investigators in 2018, Schreiber admits to creating €350m of fictitious profits for transactions that “never happened” — such as the Serta Simmons deal — to appease the auditors. Jooste, he says, “was asking me to make up the profits to be in line with budget, because he — if I can say it like this — budgeted these extra transactions and he promised every year it would be better, and then every year extended various transactions.”
Schreiber admits that “from today’s perspective, the transactions we are talking about, like TG or Talgarth, were not real,” and that “to make the audit happy, yes, I made necessary documents and I made sure that the documentation for audit purposes is sufficient”.
The board games
At the heart of the fraud was a complicated scheme to use a number of companies in Europe — secretly controlled by former executives like Schmidt or Jooste’s friends — to perform “transactions” with Steinhoff in order to make it look like billions of euros were flowing in.
This included the TG Group, set up by Schmidt; the Talgarth Group, created by former banker George Alan Evans, who had helped set up Jooste’s personal trusts; and the Campion Group in Switzerland, controlled by the same people.
PwC’s report concludes that Steinhoff “recorded sales to, or received benefits or incomes from, entities that were purportedly independent of the Steinhoff Group. However, they appeared to either be closely related to and/or controlled by Steinhoff or its employees or management.”
And while sales were put through Steinhoff’s books from these companies, this was a mirage. The actual money never arrived in its bank account. It was nothing less than a complex shell game: debts were shuffled between Steinhoff’s various arms, or “reclassified” as cash, even though no cash arrived. To make it less conspicuous, these payments were classed as “contributions” from nebulous “buying groups” in Europe.
The R106bn question is: how did Jooste do all of this under the noses of a board packed with such renowned directors as Wiese, Booysen (a former Absa CEO) and governance fundi Len Konar?
This question was posed to those directors by PwC’s White. Transcripts of the interviews show their clear anguish over their failure to detect this.
Konar, who had at one point chaired Steinhoff and had been a director on numerous boards, including those of the Reserve Bank and Old Mutual, told PwC he’d been “hurt” by his association with a company that destroyed shareholder value.
“I have paid an enormous price for being associated with Steinhoff over the recent past, which has devastated me financially and reputationally, a situation that is irredeemable. We were kept in the dark, misled, misinformed or not informed at all, and it is now clear that certain persons had ‘managed’ and ‘doctored’ the information presented to us,” he told PwC.
White asked Heather Sonn, who chaired Steinhoff after Wiese resigned in December 2017, how this had slipped past the board for a decade.
“In the board, the entire grouping is sitting there and saying that [these accusations] have been through the process, and management says they have it in hand,” Sonn said. “There was always an assurance that it has been provided for [and that] we are getting external independent advice [and] the advice says there is nothing to worry about.”
Johan van Zyl, the former CEO of Sanlam who had been on Steinhoff’s board for nearly two years when the scandal was uncovered, said it became clear in retrospect that Jooste had been fully occupied with bamboozling a board of directors who never saw this coming.
“This system has been devised to bullshit people, I can tell you this now … A lot of these transactions [between] these flipping companies with the interrelated parties and so on, they come from 2000.”
Jooste’s deceit worked, Van Zyl said, because people like him joined Steinhoff, “where everybody has already accepted it, and it has been so well-oiled by the time it gets to auditors and [advisers] that they do not see a bloody thing”.
Nor did it help that Jooste’s team resisted being questioned by the board. “They did not like opposition, particularly Markus, and you know, showed it when people asked questions that were difficult,” said Van Zyl.
Wiese, who conducted two interviews with PwC, pointed out that besides the directors many others also missed the fraud, including bankers, auditors and analysts.
But White persisted: “If Steinhoff is this big, profitable business, why did nobody ask where the cash was, and why the cash balance never grew but its debts increased all the time?” In other words, White asked: “How did you not know that this thing was fictitious?”
Wiese responded: “What you must never lose sight of, this had been going on for years, and it had gone through internal audit, external audit, component auditors.”
Jooste’s defenders
Actually, the truth is worse: not only did nobody detect the fraud, but a number of professional firms even came out to bat for Jooste in the weeks leading up to the crash, effectively rubbishing Deloitte’s concerns about Steinhoff’s accounts.
After Deloitte hoisted its red flags to Steinhoff’s board, the company wrote back to the auditors, Xavier Botha and Seinstra, in a letter signed by Jooste and Booysen and circulated to Wiese.
“The allegations have been raised and dealt with before. As we explained to you previously, none of the allegations are new,” they wrote. “Steinhoff’s board is fully apprised of current developments.” Steinhoff’s response included letters from a number of organisations supporting Jooste’s claim that they had thus far found “no wrongdoing” within the Steinhoff group.
Most notably, German law firm Flick Gocke Schaumburg (FGS) partner Karsten Randt wrote in an eight-page letter that FGS had interrogated the criminal claims and was “satisfied that sufficient legal significant considerations exist to contest the allegations”. Commercial Treuhand, the small German auditing firm that audited Steinhoff’s European operations, where most of the problems occurred, was also convinced all was above board.
Another high-profile German lawyer, Bernd Gross, who represented Jooste as his “personal defence counsel”, said that the “allegations are incorrect as there have not been incorrect balance sheets in the German companies” and were based on “a misunderstanding of the facts.”
The German arm of auditing firm Grant Thornton had also been hired to give an opinion on whether the accounting treatment in Steinhoff’s German operation was on point and similarly found no obvious red flags.
Wiese said the directors had relied on FGS, a firm of “great standing”, to investigate the allegations of criminal behaviour being made in Germany. “They reported back on two or three occasions to say that they found absolutely no wrongdoing,” he said.
The PwC report, in all its gritty detail, reveals the fault lines of a capital market architecture that just wasn’t designed or prepared to detect, never mind prevent, a Steinhoff-level fallout.
Auditors have long argued that their job isn’t to detect fraud, but rather to express an opinion on accounts they’re given. Nor were the company’s governance systems any real guardrail, as Jooste easily ran rings around the executives and board through a combination of bullying, asserting his seniority, or starving them of information.
Everyone thought someone else was looking out for shareholders, including the board of directors, who relied on the soothing words of “experts” such as FGS.
There is a revealing exchange somewhere in the middle of Van Zyl’s testimony to PwC in August 2018. He recalled being presented with Steinhoff’s 2016 financials, which he was meant to sign even though he’d only recently joined the retailer as a director. He leant across and joked to Booysen: “It covers a period that I haven’t been on the board — I hope these things are right.”
Booysen laughed, and reassured him: “Yes, we have checked it very well.” If only.
After the fall: Jooste’s stiff upper lip
In the days after he resigned on December 4, 2017, and Steinhoff’s share price took its dive, Markus Jooste was evidently unwilling to believe the game was up.
Emails contained in the PwC report, revealed here for the first time, show that Jooste mailed two of his accomplices on December 6, attaching the confidential document from Deloitte that demanded a forensic investigation into the claims of fraud.
“This is the shit they come with that we will have to fight together,” he writes to Schmidt and Evans, both of whom were instrumental in constructing the sham deals in Europe.
Schmidt is alarmed. “What is going on there? I was shocked when I got the info of your resignation,” he writes, and Jooste says he’ll phone him later to explain, saying “we must stand together like always”. Schmidt replies: “That we will do for sure.”
Remarkably, on the day after he offered Wiese his resignation, Jooste emails Schreiber, who did more than anyone to cover up the deceit. At the time, no-one was wise to Schreiber’s role as he was still in Steinhoff’s nerve centre meeting with the auditors, Wiese and the board, who were scrambling to put the pieces together.
“What is happening there?” Jooste asks Schreiber, who replies that he’d been in an audit committee meeting with Booysen, the head of Steinhoff’s audit committee. Schreiber tells Jooste that the “deal with the Americans”, Serta Simmons, “needs to be reversed” — a critical point for Jooste, who had tried to include a fictitious €740m from that deal in the 2017 accounts.
Jooste is up late, and is clearly still getting intelligence from inside Steinhoff, because he emails Schreiber back at 1am with a one-liner: “They say you said all the profits of TG is a sham …”
In reality, the revenue that Steinhoff booked from the TG Group was a sham, since that company — secretly controlled by Jooste and his friends — had not paid a cent to Steinhoff over the years, even though the retailer had supposedly booked more than €1bn in profit from it.
Schreiber replies at 6am, asking who “they” are, but telling Jooste that he was forced to confirm that the amount booked by the TG Group “is not paid, as per today”.
Jooste replies at 7.40am, saying: “You must stand strong today, it is not going to be easy.” He adds: “For you personally, I recommend you don’t attend the board meeting, don’t be at the office and work from home.” As for Jooste, he says he is “going to prepare my family for what is coming [for] them today”. Schreiber thanks Jooste for the advice, saying he will opt out of the board meeting.
This is further evidence of how phlegmatic Jooste was under pressure. Even as the extent of the fraud was being unravelled, he was methodical and calculating, just as he was a week earlier when Deloitte accused him of having defrauded Steinhoff for years.
Jooste thought he had been clever enough to get away with it. He was usually careful to speak on the phone rather than commit too much to writing.
The forensic auditors struggled to reconstruct Jooste’s Steinhoff communications because, as PwC writes in the report, there was a “standing instruction to delete the e-mail archives” of Jooste’s main email address, mjj@steinhoff.co.za.
Remarkably, Jooste’s last request to wipe his email was sent to Steinhoff’s IT team at 10.03am on December 5, the day after he told Wiese he would quit.
“Hoekom maak jy my [e-mail account, mjj@steinhoff.co.za] nie meer skoon nie?” Jooste asked Jacques van Wyk in a text message that day. (“Why are you no longer cleaning out my e-mail account?”) Van Wyk promises to log in and do that immediately, quickly apologising. Shortly after, Van Wyk sends a message back to Jooste saying “alles skoon”. (“Everything clean.”)
What Jooste evidently hadn’t bargained on was any of his co-conspirators ratting on him. Schreiber, who had sent Jooste pleading emails begging him to stop padding the accounts lest they be caught, provided the evidence trail to PwC. For his trouble, Schreiber now sits in a jail in Germany, the first prison sentence meted out for this fraud.
‘CAN YOU SEND ME A QUICK €500,000?’
Butters, the analyst who tried in 2009 to warn Wiese against investing in Steinhoff, is alarmed by the level of impunity with which Jooste operated. “He, and the group around him, did exactly as they pleased. They put through entries of significant amounts and the other executives, the supervisory board, and initially, the auditors, simply allowed them to do this.”
This was true of the billions of imaginary euros that Steinhoff stuffed into its accounts, but it was also true of Jooste’s personal relationship with the company.
There is no cruder example of this than how Jooste ordered one of his lackeys to pay him an extra €500 000 in early 2017, supposedly as part of his remuneration, and Steinhoff’s payroll department simply did this, no questions asked.
Usually, executives are paid according to strict rules overseen by a company’s remuneration committee. Yet this minor governance inconvenience meant nothing to Jooste. On February 28, 2017, Jooste emailed Schreiber: “Hi Dirk, I have switched some of my remuneration around and need to settle taxes tomorrow. Can you please arrange to deposit €500,000 in my Commerzbank personal account as part of my total package from the group please?”
Schreiber snaps to it. Ten minutes later, he emails one of his employees asking him to please make the transfer, without verifying with any of the board members or human resources executives that this was a legitimate payment. The “bonus” was duly paid.
The problem, PwC concluded, was that Jooste was “not entitled to the payment, as no evidence could be obtained to indicate that the remuneration committee and/or supervisory board approved the bonus of €500,000.” This payment was news to the directors. Asked when this had been approved, Konar said: “I was not aware of this event until informed by PwC.”
Nor was this the only time Jooste bent the rules regarding his own pay.
In May 2017, the CEO asked Schreiber to pay him €1 571 008, meant to be his “accrued bonus” for 2015 and 2016, which was to be paid in three tranches, with the last in 2018.
The late Theunie Lategan, who headed Steinhoff’s remuneration committee, told PwC that “neither I nor any of my fellow remuneration committee members were made aware, or had any knowledge, that bonus payments were made to MJ on May 31, 2017. No doubt if we were made aware thereof, we would immediately have questioned it.” Booysen told PwC unequivocally that “this amount was not due and payable to Mr Jooste on 31st May 2017 and at no stage did I [or] the remuneration committee as a whole authorise or pay [this].”
It was no surprise that Schreiber made both of these payments. For years, he had done Jooste’s dirty work when it came to forging documents.
Asked about it by PwC, Schreiber said this was just how it worked at Steinhoff. “It was quite normal that Steinhoff Europe was instructed to do payments and often no documentation was available, but [would] come later,” he said. On the €1 571 008 payment, Schreiber said Jooste “promised to provide me with an evidence document later and I have trusted this”.
In retrospect, it was of course clear that Jooste would not have been eligible for a bonus had the true picture emerged of how cash-strapped Steinhoff really was. It was on this basis that in 2019 Steinhoff claimed back R870m from Jooste, arguing that he had forged the accounts.
Jooste fought back, claiming he had “no knowledge of these allegations”. Remarkably, he also argued that had Steinhoff taken “reasonable care”, it would have “established the facts from which their claim arose” earlier.
Steinhoff’s claim hasn’t gone away since Jooste’s suicide, but it is now just one of many such multimillion-rand claims on his estate.
Whichever way you look at it, the Steinhoff saga is a lesson in the limitations of governance theory when greed is rampant. The men of integrity on the Steinhoff board were no match for Jooste and his gang of corporate thieves, despite the early warnings that came from the likes of Butters and the authorities in Europe.
Criminal conspirators and a flamboyant CEO combined to trump good governance.
AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism