Hawks following Jooste’s money

● The Hawks are investigating new fraud and money-laundering allegations against Markus Jooste, 59, whose Steinhoff empire collapsed three years ago in what is said to be SA’s biggest corporate fraud.

The Sunday Times has seen a Hawks court application, granted in the Stellenbosch magistrate’s court in July, requesting access to the bank records from 2000 to 2009 of Jooste’s horse-racing company, Mayfair Speculators.

The Hawks attached details of bank transactions involving hundreds of millions of rands moved between Steinhoff, Mayfair Speculators and other Jooste entities. These include a company breeding thoroughbred horses, involving transactions of about R52m, and millions into property development companies. One transaction was the transfer of about R2.6m in January 2006 to Bentley SA, presumably to buy a car.

Jooste had a stake until he resigned after the Steinhoff scandal broke.

There were large transfers to Erf 2825 Hermanus and Jomar Services, which between them own 27 properties. Jooste also resigned as a director of those entities.

Hawks head Gen Godfrey Lebeya told the Sunday Times that investigators and auditors were examining documents, including some handed over by the company.

“We are using auditors because one can’t go with that kind of document [Mayfair Speculators’ bank records] to court and testify with it. You need people who have been trained to interpret what has happened there, and those movements [transactions] need to be explained,” he said.

“Ultimately, voluminous documents were made available to us. We are talking about more than 1,000 pages that investigators have to go through.

“We have divided our team into groupings to go and study the documents for the purpose of criminal investigation. We are not interested in generic auditing of the firm, we want the criminal part of it. It is just the complexity of this case, because it has international activities.”

Steinhoff had operations in many countries, and in response to combined legal claims of R136bn it has proposed a settlement of R16.5bn.

The National Prosecuting Authority, which is working closely with the Hawks, said the appointment of private forensic experts had accelerated the investigation.

“It is never easy to concretely say how far investigations are. When we reach a milestone that necessitates people to be brought before court, then the public will be updated,” said NPA spokesperson Sipho Ngwema.

Jooste did not respond to a Sunday Times request for comment on the investigations of fraud and alleged money-laundering, or about the authority’s fine.

In 2018, when he appeared before parliament, Jooste blamed Steinhoff’s failure on a joint venture with Austrian businessman Andreas Seifert in 2007 and on bad legal advice he had been given.

Seifert owned a retail chain in Germany and Austria but had a fallout with Steinhoff in 2014 that ended the business relations between the two in 2015.

Trouble with Steinhoff emerged in August 2017 when German detectives began investigating the company on suspicion that it had inflated its earnings.