Steinhoff born in sin – report

INVESTIGATION: HOW MARKUS JOOSTE BENEFITTED

The fraud could have stretched back all the way to Steinhoff’s 1998 JSE listing.

to sign off the retail group’s financial statements and the group admitted to accounting irregularities of unknown magnitude.

Steinhoff’s share price has since lost 96% of its value, costing investors more than R200 million.

There is still little clarity about the nature and extent of the corporate fraud, with PwC due to submit a report next month.

Thompson and McKune, however, believe they have been able to prove their hypothesis that a British property developer, Malcolm King, and a Geneva-based former banker George Alan Evans acted as fronts for Jooste and others at Steinhoff.

They told a media briefing – hosted by the National Press Club – on Friday that they ploughed through hundreds of documents, including the Panama Papers and followed clues left by anonymous analysts and fund managers on Twitter, including that of @ JSE_Dog. They also made contact with sources by throwing bread crumbs out on Twitter, inviting people with knowledge to call them, and built on previous piecemeal probes by journalists and media houses in South Africa and

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According to Thompson and McKune, King sometimes fronted for Jooste in furniture company trades, while Evans handled Jooste’s and the Steinhoffs’ offshore companies, using “placeholders” to hide the identity of the real owners.

By 1990, Evans set himself up as a professional trust provider, through his company Warren Trustees Group. By 1997, he was handling both Jooste and the Steinhoff family’s offshore dealings, the report states.

Evans allegedly set up Danesfort Investments in Jersey for Jooste, integrating it in the structure of Jooste’s existing Nordic Settlement Trust, and set up The Marksman Trust for Bruno Steinhoff for the benefit of his daughters. The real ownership of the entities was, however, disguised behind Warren Trustees Group, the journalists state.

These entities were allegedly the main vehicles for the secret deals.

Through his associates, Jooste and the Steinhoffs seemingly also built up big positions in companies ahead of Steinhoff getting involved with the same entities, often at a premium.