Corporate governance
No bottom in sight for Steinhoff
Wiese’s resigned, its lenders are closing the funding taps, and its accounts are in chaos. It’s only getting worse ...
This week, Steinhoff confirmed what even its most optimistic investors are beginning to accept: the embattled furniture retailer doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. On Tuesday, Steinhoff’s new acting CEO Danie van der Merwe gave a revealing presentation to its jittery bankers at an unnamed hotel in London. Only, it read more like a sales pitch for why they shouldn’t pull the plug on its Pepkor, Conforama and Star Retail assets, rather than a lucid explanation of the ominous "accounting irregularities" that had forced CEO Markus Jooste to quit two weeks ago. There were enough figures in that 58-page presentation to deeply unsettle investors. For a start, Steinhoff now says it is "not possible" to give a date for when it will release its September 2017 accounts, nor its "restated" 2016 financials. Nor can it say if other years’ accounts were cooked, or even provide a sense of the "magnitude of the accounting irregularities". It seemed to confirm investors’ worst fears, after an already...
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