PRINT P1: Pepkor executives to go after Christo Wiese for Steinhoff damages
When Wiese merged Pepkor with Steinhoff in 2015, execs were asked to exchange their shares in the business for Steinhoff shares
A group of senior executives of Pepkor Holdings intends to seek compensation directly from the company’s previous chair, Christo Wiese, for damages they incurred as a result of the Steinhoff debacle, court papers filed last week show. This was according to the testimony of Dawie van Niekerk, the previous chief operating officer of Tekkie Town, a business Pepkor acquired from Steinhoff in 2017. Pepkor executives were asked, at the request of Wiese, to exchange their shares in the business for Steinhoff shares, when Wiese decided to merge Pepkor with the furniture retailer in what became the country’s largest merger in 2015. Some of these shares were held in a company called Business Ventures Investments (BVI). The value of that investment collapsed as Steinhoff’s share price fell from approximately R55 before the revelations of accounting irregularities to as low as R1 in the months following December. In 2018, Pepkor controversially provided a guarantee to banks that had lent money ...
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