What’s under the table?
What looks like a sneaky loan taken out by Markus Jooste from a Steinhoff subsidiary suddenly changes names
Former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste appears to have taken an undisclosed loan of R1bn from a company part-owned by Steinhoff that wasn’t declared to shareholders at the time, according to new court papers.
That loan was mysteriously transferred to a company controlled by Jooste’s friend Malcolm King, an FM investigation shows.
This raises further questions about Jooste’s role in the enormous accounting scandal that has engulfed the global furniture retailer and caused its share price to collapse.
Jooste was a director of holding company Mayfair Speculators until December when, in the wake of his resignation from Steinhoff, he ended all his directorships.
It is only thanks to court papers filed by two banks that lent Mayfair money that the existence of the loan has come to light. No record of the loan to Jooste or to his related entities shows up in the annual reports of Steinhoff.
Two of three banks (Investec and Absa) that lent to Mayfair moved to recoup the hundreds of millions of rands owed to them when the Steinhoff shares they held as collateral for the loans collapsed after news of Steinhoff’s accounting irregularities surfaced in December last year. The banks asked the courts to liquidate Mayfair Speculators.
In a balance sheet provided to the banks in early March this year, Mayfair listed an R867.5m loan from
Dutch company Hachmer Beheer as a liability on its balance sheet.
The size of the debt makes Hachmer the second-largest Steinhoff creditor behind Sanlam.
It is unclear what the loan was for. Besides having to write down the value of a number of assets, Steinhoff also had to “de-consolidate” some companies that it previously thought it owned and had included in its own books. One of these was a Dutch company called Habufa, of which Steinhoff owned half until January this year.
“The ongoing investigations identified information that suggests Habufa was never controlled,” says Steinhoff. Based on this finding, Steinhoff decided to sell whatever amount of the company it thought it owned back to the other shareholders of the company, resulting in a write-down of
€52m in its books for the six months ending March.
Crucially, however, documents now obtained by the FM from the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce reveal that Hachmer Beheer is a sub-