Saving Steinhoff is Heather Sonn’s 14-hour-a-day mission
Some stakeholders would prefer a chairman with deep experience managing large, global corporations; others approve of mixing up boards
Until December, Heather Sonn was running a small investment firm in Cape Town. Then an accounting scandal erupted at Steinhoff International and she was tapped to chair the board. The 46-year-old says she accepted the nonexecutive role because she felt a duty to those affected by the crisis, which has wiped more than 95% from the share price. She also realised it was the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. "When things are broken, I want to fix them," Sonn said in an interview at Steinhoff’s headquarters in Stellenbosch. "It was clear it was going to take a heck of a lot of time and I would have to step out of other formal roles as this was going to be an immersion." Six months on, Sonn, who has likened the embattled retailer to a burning building, is still in firefighter mode. Steinhoff, the owner of Conforama in France, Britain’s Poundland and Mattress Firm in the US, arranged new credit lines for units in those countries in January and has raised about $2bn se...
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