More woes for ex-Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste as the JSE fines R15m

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange has issued two fines of R7,5 million against the embattled former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste.

Jooste is also barred by the JSE from serving as a director for two decades, due to failures at the helm that prompted SA’s biggest-ever accounting scandal.

According to the JSE, Jooste has informed the JSE he does not agree with the decision and has challenged it, the JSE said in a statement, with the Financial Services Tribunal on Tuesday dismissing the suspension application, other than with regards to the fines.

BusinessTech Africa has found that the JSE is opposing Jooste’s challenge, but the ruling on Tuesday means it is in a position to impose its public censure and bar him from holding any directorships.

The JSE said it had imposed two fines of R7.5 million, the maximum allowable and one is for releasing financial statements that did not comply with listing requirements and contained incorrect, false, and misleading statements, and the other is for a fictitious invoice that falsely inflated income by R376 million.

Back in August last year, the JSE fined Steinhoff CFO Ben la Grange R2 million and barred him from serving as a company director for a decade, in part for processing that fictitious invoice.

The handwritten note, allegedly given to La Grange by Jooste, was also used by SA Reserve Bank to convince a court to sign off on an order to attach Jooste’s assets.

News24 reports that Jooste’s abrupt resignation in December 2017 triggered a share price collapse and has been an existential threat to Steinhoff, which managed to settle multiple lawsuits against it.

Sasfin Securities chief global equities strategist David Shapiro said it has taken six years for these types of sanctions to materialise, adding it was a complex case with multiple threads, which made it difficult for organisations to make decisions hastily.

“I think what has happened i[is that] it has been very difficult for all these organisations [such as the JSE] to impose penalties against him, and to challenge him, and to bring him to order because the issues around Jooste are so complex and they couldn’t get full details of the investigations,” he said.

“Sooner or later we are going to see some of the big cases against him [Jooste]. He is going to be spending a lot of time now fighting off cases and defending himself.”

Casparus Treurnicht, portfolio manager and research analyst at Gryphon Asset Management, said the JSE would have been compelled to follow protocol and conduct its investigation, and that fining and disqualifying Jooste from holding a directorship were obvious actions to take.

Treurnicht argued that Jooste would “most likely oppose these steps and use delay tactics for as long as it takes”, adding that this was in keeping with the “character that the market might have created of him after all that’s happened”.