Christo Wiese has welcomed the freezing of assets belonging to former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste, the alleged kingpin behind SA’s largest fraud.
“To use the cliché I am happy to see that the wheels of justice start turning and that the people [who] caused the damage and the hurt will start experiencing the consequences of the misdeeds,” said Wiese, one of the biggest casualties of fraud after putting in R59bn in Steinhoff. He took about R8bn as a settlement.
In the first move against Jooste by the authorities, five years after the retailer imploded, the Reserve Bank seized more than R1.4bn worth of assets belonging to him, his wife and his family trust.
The court order, signed by Western Cape judge Andre le Grange on October 6, also effectively freezes Jooste’s home in Hermanus, the Lanzerac wine farm in Stellenbosch, five vehicles, about R100m worth of art, jewellery and other assets.
No-one has yet been prosecuted for the fraud, which was revealed in December 2017 when auditors would not sign off on accounts. Steinhoff shareholders lost more than R200bn as the share plummeted 95%.
While this is the first action taken against Jooste in SA, it relates only to suspected exchange control contraventions, rather than the wider fraud involving R106bn in “fictitious and/or irregular transactions” that duped many pension funds and investors in the country.
Wiese said he always believed Jooste “sooner or later” would be held accountable “as the fraud was just too huge”.
“It caused too much damage, not only the financial damage, the damage to the reputation of individuals, but the damage to the reputation of the country as a whole.
“The damage to ... the reputation of business people in SA was enormous. It’s something that should never be allowed to go unpunished.”
On the fact that Jooste has yet to be charged by the National Prosecuting Authority, Wiese said it is even taking the German financial authorities a long time and they still have not managed to prosecute Jooste successfully.
“This is a fraud that ... had been perpetrated over ... 10 to 15 years. It’s not something that happened overnight. It was a long, well-planned, meticulously executed fraud,” he said.
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