Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, in the Showmax Original Steinheist
For Immediate Use
Showmax is now streaming two new episodes of Steinheist, which go even deeper into unpacking the biggest corporate scam in South African history and how the net tightened around former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste in the build-up to his suicide on 21 March 2024.
If you were outraged by the first instalment, director Richard Finn Gregory has some good news for you.
“I think the new episodes show that the wheels of justice do turn, even if a lot more slowly than we’d like,” says Richard. “We had a rough time during the state capture years, when South Africans started to lose faith that our country could actually prosecute crimes and make a dent in corruption. But the new episodes show that our public institutions do have teeth and are able to prosecute, eventually. So audiences will be left with some optimism that justice can happen in South Africa.”
Richard also hopes the prosecution of those involved will send a clear message to the international community – “that South Africa is able to prosecute crimes – which will hopefully get us off the investment grey list and lead to more business confidence in our country.”
Richard and producer Elle Oosthuizen won the Sanlam Group Financial Journalist of the Year award for 2022 for the first instalment of Steinheist – the first TV journalists to win the prize in nearly a decade.
The two new episodes have been just as critically acclaimed as the first three, with leading Afrikaans critic Leon van Nierop hailing them as “briljant”.
Episodes 4 and 5 pick up the story a month after the documentary series’ initial 2022 release, when the Reserve Bank froze R1.4bn of Jooste’s assets. This was followed by his 20-year ban and R15m fine from the JSE; his record R475m fine from The Financial Sector Conduct Authority; his police summons to stand trial; and the seizure of R60m of assets from Berdine Odendaal, his alleged mistress.
“When the first episodes were released, people would say, ‘It’s been five years since the scandal and there’s been no action taken.’ So we try to show in these episodes what was already happening out of the public eye. For example, we speak to Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, and Alex Pascoe, head of market abuse at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, and we try to lift the lid on what was really happening behind the scenes, like the court orders that were being issued in secret. Hopefully that just gives us a little more confidence that when there’s a major crime like this, the authorities are working on it, even if they can’t reveal their hand to the public just yet.”
Teaming up again with true-crime pioneers IdeaCandy (Tracking Thabo Bester, Devilsdorp), Richard started filming the new episodes in mid-2023. They felt ready to give the series an ending “when some of the highest execs at Steinhoff started seeing the inside of jail cells. That’s what people had been crying out for ever since the scandal happened.”
Episodes 4 and 5 explore the ongoing attempts to recover the money and bring Jooste’s accomplices to justice. These included insider trading prosecutions in South Africa and fraud convictions in Germany, as well as the arrest of former Steinhoff executive Stéhan Grobler, and sentencing and plea deal of Ben la Grange, Steinhoff’s former chief financial officer.
Richard believes the new episodes will give audiences a sense of clarity and closure. “At the end of the first three episodes, we were pretty convinced Markus Jooste did it – but we were left with the question of who else was involved. We manage to answer that question in these episodes. We’ve now got a clear idea of exactly what the scams were and who was involved.”
He believes more arrests are coming. “There are some high-profile people who are in jail who have turned state witness. They are helping prosecutors with all the evidence they need to prosecute more people. From here on out, I think we can just continue watching the news to see who the next high-profile arrest is going to be, because I’m pretty sure there will be more.”
Richard believes the Steinhoff scandal will be remembered for broadening people’s thinking about corruption in South Africa. “Up till that point, we had thought of corruption in this country as being linked to the government and the public sector: things like Nkandla, the Guptas, and state capture. So when Steinhoff blew open, it made us rethink corruption in South Africa, that this was also in the corporate sector.”
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Bonus questions:
On 6 December 2017, Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste resigned amid an investigation into accounting irregularities at the retail giant, which owned the likes of Ackermans, Incredible Connection, Morkels, Pennypinchers, PEP, Russells, Tekkie Town and Timbercity. In the simplest possible terms, can you explain what ‘accounting irregularities’ means in the context of Steinhoff?
Markus and some of his accomplices created fraudulent transactions. Sometimes it was literally writing numbers on a piece of paper and processing it as an invoice. These fraudulent transactions meant that it appeared there was a lot more money flowing around the Steinhoff companies than there really was. That made investors think that the company was doing well, so everyone wanted to buy Steinhoff shares. This meant the share price went up and the company was then worth a lot more money. This enabled Steinhoff to use its own shares to swap for other companies’ shares, using those shares as payment, almost as currency, to buy other companies. That’s how the Steinhoff Group of companies got bigger and bigger. The value of the company kept increasing as it made more acquisitions. So you had this growing bubble of value, which was all built on a house of cards. It was all built on fraudulent transactions. When that came out, the share price bubble burst almost immediately and lost something like 90% of its value, almost overnight. There was about R135 billion worth of fraudulent transactions that the PWC report uncovered. When the share price dropped, the loss in value of the company was over R200 billion.
With Steinheist, what attracted you to the story right in the beginning?
IdeaCandy approached me to pitch on the story originally. Wim Steyn, their exec producer, had watched The Boers at the End of the World. He said this film had stuck in his mind, so he’d always wanted to explore working together.
I was surprised when I saw the brief because I thought, ‘This is financial crime. I’m not a finance person at all. And it’s a docu series, which is a format I haven’t worked in before.’ So my gut reaction was, ‘No, I don’t think this is for me.’
But when I did some more thinking I realised I was really interested in the personalities behind it. The sums of money were huge. When you read the news reports, that’s the kind of thing that you see the most. But what I wasn’t reading enough about was who the people were behind it, and what their motivations were. How did they go about perpetrating these crimes?’
That became my pitch. I said, ‘Well, look, I would want to tell this from a very human perspective, and try to get under the characters’ skins as much as I can. And I’ll try to find clever metaphors and ways of explaining complex concepts in a way that a dummy like me could understand.’
It turns out that they loved that approach. So we started working together, and that was the beginning of what’s now become a long and fruitful relationship.