How they cooked the books at Steinhoff for years
Accounting system enabled CEO and cabal to loot the business
23 January 2025 - 05:00
UPDATED 28 January 2025 - 11:45
Steinhoff’s accounting system presented a perfect opportunity for its former CEO Markus Jooste and his close-knit cabal to manipulate the group’s books, particularly those of its vast European operations, to inflate earnings through late journals.
This modus operandi ramped up until 2017 when the fraud was uncovered. The PwC report on Steinhoff malfeasance — to date SA’s biggest corporate fraud scandal — shows the group’s erstwhile European finance chief Dirk Schreiber played a key role in the multiyear fraudulent scheme and Jooste pulling the strings...
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