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.
Mayfair Speculators is a subsidiary of Mayfair Holdings, Jooste’s personal investment company. He and his son-in-law, Stefan Potgieter, were directors until the Steinhoff collapse in December 2017.
In 2015, Forbes listed Jooste as one of Africa’s 50 richest people, with a net worth of $400m (about R6.5bn).
Two years later, the fraud involving one of the world’s biggest furniture retailers wiped about R100bn off Steinhoff’s value, and Jooste quit as CEO.
Two weeks ago, the JSE fined Steinhoff R13.5m for breaching listing requirements, including publishing false and misleading information.
The company’s financial records for 2016, 2015 and years before were found to be noncompliant.
This week Jooste was fined R161m by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority for insider trading before the collapse of Steinhoff shares. It is the biggest penalty imposed by the authority on an individual.
Bank records show big sums, some as high as R82m, flowing from Steinhoff to Mayfair Speculators and in the opposite direction. There were also many multimillionrand transfers from Mayfair Speculators to Jooste companies, among them Klawervlei Stud, a thoroughbred enterprise in which