By Alec Hogg
Within hours of former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste’s shock resignation last Wednesday, some social media commentators were dubbing him South Africa’s version of American Ponzi King Bernie Madoff. That seemed a stretch. No longer. Yesterday’s announcement that Steinhoff’s 2016 audited annual financial statements are a fiction is like the mushroom cloud proving a nuclear explosion.
The 2016 annual report, which had been available for download for almost a year, has been removed from Steinhoff’s website. And within the 120,000 employee group Jooste is now being called “Markus Madoff” – a reference to the once-storied American investment advisor whose $65bn fraud-fuelled empire collapsed in 2008.
Madoff, a former chairman of NASDAQ and confidante to New York’s rich and powerful, was sentenced to 150 years in prison and all his assets seized. There’s been no discovery of a Steinhoff equivalent of Madoff’s infamous “17th floor” – the secret office where intimates passed bookkeeping entries that kept the Ponzi Scheme hidden. But yesterday’s announcement tells us the search has already exposed serious fraud.
Yesterday’s bombshell came within a week of the board establishing an investigative committee of Steinhoff directors Dr Johan van Zyl (ex-CEO Sanlam), Dr Steve Booysen (ex-CEO Absa) and Heather Sonn (ex-Merrill Lynch). It’s an early sign that we can rely on this well qualified trio to expose every dodgy deal conducted by Steinhoff’s once trusted leader. Not least because their own reputations are on the line.
