Markus Jooste, the disgraced former CEO of retail giant Steinhoff, has suffered a major setback after the Western Cape High Court granted the South African Reserve Bank the right to seize more than R1-billion in assets belonging the businessman and his associates.
The central bank successfully argued that Jooste is suspected of breaching exchange control regulations.
The assets, estimated at R1.2-billion, include his Lanzerac wine farm, five luxury vehicles, and jewellery.
Jooste, who has been out of the limelight since 2017, stands accused of being the mastermind behind the multibillion-rand fraud that brought Steinhoff to its knees.
Jooste’s sudden resignation from Steinhoff on December 5 2017 was followed by a protracted controversy concerning Steinhoff’s accounting practices in its central European business dating years back.
In 2019, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released a damning report that pointed to Jooste and other directors who, it said, had recorded income from fictitious and/or irregular transactions between the 2009 and 2017 financial years.
PwC said the fraud saw the group’s profits inflated by €6.5-billion (R116-billion) in the period. Sunday World has calculated that the company reported combined profits of R74.7-billion during the period.
Jooste has only commented on the allegations against him in 2018, before legislators, where he washed his hands off the near demise of Steinhoff, blaming audit firm Deloitte and a business partnership with a certain Andreas Seifert.
He and his accomplices are yet to be charged despite investigations in both South Africa and Germany.
In July, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) fined Steinhoff €11.2-million after the company was found guilty of violations of disclosure requirements in the European country.
BaFin said in a statement on Wednesday the Stellenbosch-headquartered Steinhoff only submitted the annual report of the Dutch holding company for 2016/17 in mid-2019. This was too late, according to regulations.
At the time, Steinhoff was on its knees, fighting to stay afloat financially following an accounting scandal. The fine is payable in three tranches, beginning in March 2023, the regulator said.
“Steinhoff International Holdings failed to make its annual financial report for the financial year 2016/2017 publicly available within the prescribed period,” the regulator said in a statement.
“Furthermore, Steinhoff International Holdings failed to publish voting rights notifications within the prescribed period. The company may lodge an appeal against the administrative fine order.”
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