On December 6 2017, after its CEO Markus Jooste resigned during an investigation into accounting irregularities, the share price of Steinhoff fell a whopping 90% in a week. The crisis in the company once lauded as the “Ikea of Africa” wiped R200bn off the JSE and from the accounts of the pension funds of ordinary South Africans. The Steinhoff collapse also cost Christo Wiese billions of dollars, turning the dollar multibillionaire into a mere dollar multimillionaire overnight.
In recent years documentaries, series and films that deal with the opaque world of finance — such as Enron, Inside Job, The Big Short, The Inventor, The Dropout and WeCrash — have found popular success. Couple that with its status as the biggest corporate fraud in SA’s history and the Steinhoff scandal made perfect sense for production company Idea Candy — responsible for Showmax’s massive docuseries hit Devilsdorp — to choose as their next project.
They built the series on the book Steinheist, written by Financial Mail editor Rob Rose, and enlisted Cape Town-based documentarian Richard Gregory (The Boers at the End of the World) to helm the project.
For Gregory, whose previous work is very much focused on people, the series offered an opportunity to tell a story. While “interesting to people involved in the business or finance community”, it is also “a lot wider than that. What I think makes this really interesting to a very wide audience, to all South Africans really, is who are the people behind it, what makes them tick, what are their interpersonal relationships, how did they think they could get away with it?”
Over three episodes, using Rose as its main guide and featuring a host of interviews with journalists such as Alec Hogg, Ryk van Niekerk and Stellenbosch Mafia author Pieter du Toit as well as key players and heavy financial hitters such as Wiese, Coronation’s Thys du Toit and German businessman Bruno Steinhoff, Steinheist unravels the complicated history of the company and the role played in its exponential growth and disastrous collapse by the charming but slippery snake overseeing it all — Markus Jooste. As Showmax has gleefully touted in its publicity material, the series features the “richest cast” in the streaming platform’s history.
To make the often opaque world of financial dealings understandable to general audiences, Gregory and his team used a number of devices, including to-camera-explanations and practical demonstrations. As the director points out, “We’re trying to make sure that it’s as accessible to as wide an audience as possible but in no way dumbed down. The financial community is still going to get a lot out of this and hopefully a lot they haven’t seen before in the news — and your average South African is also going to learn a lot about how these financial transactions work.”
We’re trying to make sure that it’s as accessible to as wide an audience as possible but in no way dumbed down. The financial community is still going to get a lot out of this.
— Richard Gregory
Rose’s access to key players and business power brokers helped. “Rob was at the forefront of the story all along and he was the natural collaborator to work with and that relationship worked really well ... [He’s also] really good at taking complex financial stuff and putting it in a way that a wider audience can understand,” says Gregory.
Rose initially found turning his work into a television series a strange idea but now he feels differently. “Generally the business press struggles to communicate with the ordinary person and so I think this is a really important way to do that. A lot of people won’t read the book but they’ll definitely watch the series. I basically did a few interviews, Richard and the team did the real work.”
One of the key decisions Gregory had to take was whether to provide Jooste — who in the series is the subject of much speculation by former colleagues and even analysis by a forensic psychologist — the opportunity to participate. Whether the most hated man in the SA business world decided to take the producers up on the offer remains for you to find out when it lands on Showmax next week, but rest assured there is plenty of intrigue and drama to keep you watching, with or without an appearance by the villain of the piece.
It is also not a series that, as Gregory is keen to note, “About billionaire’s tears. Does an ordinary South African have a whole lot of sympathy when a billionaire loses a few of his billions but he still has a few billion left?” [It was thus important to ask] how does this affect the lives of us mere mortals?”
Ultimately, Gregory believes the series will show that the Steinhoff crisis demonstrates how the SA corporate world is “not necessarily as squeaky clean as we’d like to believe”, as also evidenced by subsequent scandals such as Tongaat Hulett’s. “And those are only the ones that we’ve become aware of. In the same way that we talk about needing to reinforce our oversight of government and stamp out corruption, we need to make sure that we also keep an eye on what’s going on in the corporate sector.”
What emerges from the series is not just a damning indictment of the greed and narcissism of one man and its devastating effects on those involved and ordinary South Africans, but also, as Rose argues, the broader consequences of a scandal that “caused fewer people to want to invest in the country”. And it throws light on “the wider crisis in our society, which we’re dealing with now, where there’s a lack of trust, which it contributed towards”.
• The first episode of ‘Steinheist’ streams on Showmax on September 22. New episodes will be available weekly on Thursdays.
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