STEINHOFF SAGA
AYABONGA CAWE: The big gamble that took (almost) everyone for a ride
Markus Jooste, the man with many race-horses, took a monumental gamble, far bigger than any wager at Turffontein’s spectacle for the well-heeled. The Steinhoff International CEO who resigned earlier in December took a gamble on our ability to buy into and believe the hype that surrounds the "poster oom" of Afrikaner capital — Christo Wiese — and the belief we have in the competency of the white male. Wiese had said German regulators’ murmurs earlier in 2017 about Steinhoff were a "sideshow" worth overlooking. It was just one of the many ventures that the man who bought OK Bazaars for R1 brandished as one of his greatest "monuments". It was much more interesting than anything Dan O’Meara had imagined when he wrote Volkskapitalisme in the 1980s. Once discovered, the scam slashed double-figure percentages of value from the Steinhoff share price.
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