AT 15h20 on the afternoon of Human Rights Day of 2024 in South Africa, Markus Jooste, the ex-CEO of Steinhoff International, was reported to had sustained a gunshot wound to the head on a beach in the town of Hermanus, from which he succumbed while en-route to a hospital.
He was 63 at the time and his death – a suspected suicide – occurred a day after he had been ordered by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority to pay a fine of R475 million for accounting fraud, and a day before he was scheduled to present himself over to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation in Pretoria, regarding charges of fraud, racketeering and contravention of the Financial Markets Act.
When the accounting scandal broke, close on 98% of Steinhoff’s share value was wiped out in 2017 – affecting investors in South African pension funds.
The son of a postal worker from Pretoria, Jooste had relocated Steinhoff’s headquarters, along with his family, from Johannesburg to Stellenbosch – marking a grand return to a town at whose university he’d earlier studied accountancy.
Jooste had engineered the construction of Steinhoff Africa and thereafter Steinhoff International into a behemoth, at the top of whose labyrinthine pyramid he had installed himself. A multinational and multibillion-rand enterprise (whose portfolio consisted of 40 brands) which manufactured, distributed and sold household goods, it had 12 000 retail outlets, employed 130 000 people – 50 000 of whom worked in South Africa – had realized year-on-year growth of almost 12% by 2016, with its share trading on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange affording it a total market capitalisation of R240 billion in 2017.
At the time, Steinhoff was the second largest ‘integrated household goods retailer by turnover’ in the world!
One of a collective of South Africa’s wealthy all Afrikaans males – scathingly referred to by the Economic Freedom Fighter’s leader Julius Malema as, ‘The Stellenbosch Mafia’ (a term which might be a quirk of business journalism which may refer to, a few businessmen in Stellenbosch responsible for manipulating the economy and in charge of the country and controlling society) – as a way of gaining acceptance among the town’s elite, Jooste identified rugby as a path to influence, duly approving Steinhoff International to sponsor the Varsity Cup (a South African inter-university rugby competition) from 2008 and following that through sponsorship of the Springboks’ men’s and women’s Sevens rugby teams from 2015.
Steinhoff’s decamping to the cradle of Afrikanerdom changed the town’s culture. Its employees snapped up luxury properties at the exclusive golf estate, De Zalze, with some having chauffeurs and others commuting in fancy cars.
Jooste himself spared no dime for opulence, by: in 2003, along with two colleagues, purchasing Jonkersdrift, a farm in the Jonkershoek Valley in which they had three lavish family mansions built among vineyards for R25.6 million; becoming South Africa’s biggest owner of racehorses in which sport he invested millions of rands whilst conducting business ‘mafia style’ through ownership of the whole value chain (auctioneer, seller and buyer) of the industry; becoming the dealmaker extraordinaire who jet-set globally in Steinhoff’s Gulfstream G550 private jet, in addition to indulging ‘the flamboyant CEO with the ladies’ man appeal’ (an extramarital consorting with a blonde polo player who he put up in a luxury apartment in Bantry Bay became gossip fodder) status alluded to by a Business Day journalist. Such conspicuous display of wealth resulted in the entity becoming the talk-of-the-town, with young graduates expressly pining for jobs at ‘Markus’ company’ and the grapevine among the townsfolk revolving around how ‘Steinies’ (jargon for Steinhoff shares) performed – leaving a prominent resident and CEO of Remgro, Jannie Durand enquiring: “But who are these people?”
Alas, reality dawned when Steinhoff imploded, owing to irregularities regarding the entity’s audited financial statements, over five days in December 2017, resulting in billions of the entity’s market capitalisation being wiped off – causing Jooste to resign via SMS and e-mail and furious investors to label him a ‘thief’ and ‘con artist’.
On September 5, 2018, he would deny any wrongdoing before a joint parliamentary committee, instead, blaming the fiasco on the company’s board. Jooste had done what would be referred to as a ‘Steinheist’!
Then Steinhoff’s chairman and biggest investor, Christo Wiese resigned from the entity on December 14, 2017. As a consequence of Jooste’s betrayal, by 2020, Wiese’s fortune had been decimated from almost $6 billion to $255 million – rendering him to lose his dollar-billionaire status. Wiese’s ‘mindboggling’ loss left him a ‘defeated man’. The ex-Shoprite honcho – who toiled for 53 years and gave 200 000 people jobs – informed a parliamentary committee that the debacle caught him unawares.
For someone who informed this tome’s author, Pieter du Toit, that ‘you don’t mourn money, you mourn people’ – Wiese launched a claim of R59 billion against Steinhoff, which some Stellenbosch heavyweights believe he won’t be able to recover.
A boutique town surrounded by vineyards and mountains, Stellenbosch – which is a base to 16 of South Africa’s JSE-listed entities and home to some of the wealthiest corporate titans, replete with both their Cape Dutch and cubist architectural mansions, as well as wine estates – is something of a South African cross between Silicon Valley and the Hamptons in the US, and is gleefully referred to by its dealmakers as ‘the Bubble’ (in reference to it being cosseted from maladies such as poverty and mismanagement of the rest of South Africa, inter alia).
Those entities’ interests – included in the Top 40 Index which represent almost 80% of listed shares on the JSE – encompass almost the entire spectrum (viz, IT, banking, healthcare, retail, consumables, etc.) of the country’s economy, from whose revenues members of the so-called Mafia continue to rake unimaginable fortunes counted into trillions!
Reminiscent of the Broederbond, this collective not only studied in Stellenbosch and settled there, but stayed in the same university residence! Foremost of these is the so-called ‘don of the Winelands Mafia’, viz, Johann Rupert, the Remgro honcho who is included among the likes of Jooste, Wiese, the Rand Merchant Bank’s GT Ferreira (a Maties alumn who made his fortune in Johannesburg and returned to Stellenbosch after being shot in the chest in a botched hijacking in 1992), Mediclinic’s Edwin Hertzog, Capitec Bank’s Michiel le Roux, Naspers’ Koos Bekker and Jannie Mouton of the PSG Group (whose boardroom is bedecked with paintings of South Africa’s finest artists such as JH Pierneef, Irma Stern, et al., and counts Curro private schools among its investment portfolio), et al.
The fraternity extended to their entities holding interests in one another, with many members also sitting on one another’s boards – the sort of proximity which has given rise to conspiracy theories positing them as capable of directing governments and markets.
Rupert – who carries clout in the boardrooms of influence (President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde is a friend who nominated him for France’s Légion d’honneur) and high finance in Europe and the United States – detests being called part of the Stellenbosch Mafia.
Such is his domineering personality than even as the EFF’s Julius Malema accused him of being the vanguard of a Western conspiracy to subjugate and recolonise South Africa – his attacks couldn’t deter his then deputy Floyd Shivambu from cultivating a relationship with Rupert as his go-to man in his informal intelligence network who provided him with heads-up before major developments in the ANC.
(Ironically, Shivambu went to Stellenbosch to meet Rupert and GT Ferreira to seek assistance towards the construction of a hospital in Limpopo – all of which the current MK Party member denies.)
The Rembrandt van Rijn cigarette-smoking Rupert, whose pleasures include splashing his immense wealth in investing in rugby – he treated the Springboks team to a braai on his wine estate L’Omarins in Franschhoek where he gifted each of them an expensive wristwatch, after they’d won the 2019 Rugby World Cup – presides over Remgro, Richemont (the luxury goods supplier) and Reinet Investments, which feature on the JSE’s top 100 companies. When an infamous report on irregularities at Steinhoff surfaced, Rupert didn’t feel sympathy for Jooste but conversely showed some for Wiese (with whom he reportedly has a tempestuous relationship).
As for a Mafia controlling South Africa, Rupert’s Remgro lieutenant, Durand counters: ‘I don’t think so, we’re normal people who just happen to run big businesses.’
A paperback, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaires’ Club, is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R260.
