The Financial Services Board says it can't be blamed for failing to do anything about Steinhoff until it was too late. Says Solly Keetse, who heads the board's directorate for market abuse: "Steinhoff hasn't published its 2017 audited financials. If you're going to investigate false and misleading reports, you need to be able to establish what was misreported, and you can only gather that from the audited financials." He implies that if anyone's to blame, it's the JSE. Before its share price collapsed, Steinhoff was the seventh-largest Top 40 JSE stock, accounting for about 2.5% of the index. "The companies that are listed on the JSE are regulated by the JSE," says Keetse. "In South Africa, we've got a self-regulating model in terms of which we regulate the JSE and the JSE regulates the companies." It's the JSE's job to alert the FSB, he says. "We're called to investigate if there is a factual case of false and misleading reporting by a company listed on the JSE in terms of its audi...

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