WeeklySA_AdminGREED: Riveting read of life and times – and death – of Markus Jooste, the Stellenbosch mafiosi…
By Jacob Mawela
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 Hermanus, Western Cape, from which he succumbed to his wounds while enroute 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’ pension funds in South Africa.
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, had 12 000 retail outlets, employed 130 000 people – 50 000 of whom worked in South Africa – had realised 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 lite, 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. In 2003, along with two colleagues, purchased 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 while 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 whom 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?”
