Late South African tycoon Markus Jooste's Steinhoff secrets probed in new book

Markus Jooste, the late South African tycoon who built Steinhoff International into a global retail empire before its 2017 collapse, is the subject of a new book that its publisher says draws on the company's confidential forensic report and on insiders speaking publicly for the first time.

"Puppet Master: The secrets of Markus Jooste and the Steinhoff crash" is written by South African journalist James-Brent Styan and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. The softcover was released in October, and at least one South African bookseller lists it at R350 ($21).

The publisher describes the Steinhoff collapse as the largest corporate fraud in South African history, one that wiped more than R200 billion ($12 billion) from global stock markets. It says the book examines Jooste's private life, the way he ran the company and the silences that allowed the deception to grow, and it argues that ambition and self-interest got past every corporate-governance safeguard in place at the group.

What the book draws on

The new title is a sequel to Styan's 2018 book on the scandal, "Steinhoff: Inside SA's biggest corporate crash," which the publisher says became a number one bestseller. Styan, who wrote in 2015 about the troubles at state power utility Eskom, has now written six nonfiction titles.

Much of the material Styan uses was kept out of public view for years. PwC, the accounting firm hired by Steinhoff to investigate its books, produced a forensic report that runs to thousands of pages and was never published in full.

"And that was the PWC report. 7,000 pages that has just remained under wraps," Styan said in an interview with Stephen Grootes on The Money Show, according to a September 28 report by Eyewitness News. He told the program that the PwC work took about 18 months and lays out most of what is now known about the collapse.

Styan also questioned how the warning signs were missed for so long. Deloitte audited Steinhoff's accounts for more than 20 years, he said, and was among the firms that failed to act on what he described as obvious red flags. "Just so many clever bright and brilliant people just seem to miss the obvious signs," he said.

He cautioned that the full story may never be told because Jooste is no longer alive. "There's always going to be some things that we'll never know," Styan said.

From retail empire to collapse

Jooste became chief executive of Steinhoff in 2000 and grew the business through a string of acquisitions across Europe, Africa, Australia and the United States. He resigned on December 5, 2017, after the company disclosed accounting irregularities and delayed its results. The shares lost most of their value within days, and the losses spread to pension funds and ordinary investors across South Africa.

Regulators pursued Jooste for years afterward. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange found him guilty of breaching its listing requirements, fined him R15 million ($900,000) and barred him from serving as a director of a listed company for 20 years, a ruling that the Financial Sector Conduct Authority upheld in 2023.

On March 20, 2024, the FSCA imposed a R475 million ($28.5 million) administrative penalty on Jooste. The regulator said its investigation found that he and Dirk Schreiber, a former Steinhoff executive, made or published false, misleading or deceptive statements about the company's financial statements between 2014 and 2017. Schreiber, who cooperated with the investigation, was not penalized by the FSCA and had been sentenced to three and a half years in prison by a German court the previous year.

Jooste died the next day, on March 21, 2024, near his home in Hermanus in the Western Cape. He was 63. South African media reported that he took his own life. He had not been criminally charged in South Africa at the time of his death, although German prosecutors had brought charges against him. The FSCA said after his death that it would keep assisting the Hawks, South Africa's elite police unit, and the National Prosecuting Authority with their investigations into other people linked to the case.

The full PwC report has still not been made public. Business Report, a South African newspaper, said in January 2025 that it was seeking access to the document.