Steinheist. Rob Rose
and I am still not in a positive spirit,” he says.
It hasn’t helped that the volcano erupted around the weeks when Bruno Steinhoff was toasting his endurance. At the end of November 2017, he had travelled to South Africa for what was meant to be a triumphant 80th birthday party at Lanzerac. His 80th was an aptly lavish affair. The Stellenbosch City Orchestra played alongside guest soloists André Terblanche, Janel Speelman, Niel Rademan and Charity Leburu. An exorbitantly priced glass marquee was set up and the champagne flowed. Steinhoff revelled in it. A few days later, he returned to Westerstede, where he held his “German party” for his 80th – the event at which Markus Jooste gave a speech, over that fevered weekend in December when all hell was breaking loose in South Africa.
It helped Bruno Steinhoff that he wasn’t as involved in the business as he’d once been. In 2008, just after his 70th birthday, he’d resigned as Steinhoff’s chairman, and given up most of his executive duties. He remained a non-executive director at Steinhoff until February 2018, but he spent most days in Westerstede rather than Cape Town.
Today, during the week, Steinhoff wakes up and drives the kilometre or so up the road from his gated estate in Westerstede to his office on the fourth floor of Steinhoff’s European headquarters – adjacent to the immense 12-storey warehouse which squats over the town, branded Steinhoff Möbel. Outside that facebrick building, there are four flags that attest to the company’s roots: the German flag, the South African, the European Union, and the one bearing the Steinhoff emblem.
Walk inside the door of that building, and you’ll see it’s a monument to the passion that drove Bruno Steinhoff for the last six decades: building furniture. The books on the shelves include the 1976 edition of Möbel: Eine Stilgeschichte durch vier Jahrtausende – Mit über 1000 Abbildungen, a history of trade in Westerstede over two hundred years, and a coffee-table book history of the furniture company. Perhaps incongruously, there’s also My Book, the coffee-table book amalgamation of wildlife photography and “inspirational quotes” written by Brian Joffe, the founder of the industrial company Bidvest.
On one wall of his roomy office, on the fourth floor, there is a map of the world that Bruno Steinhoff is fond of using to illustrate Steinhoff’s expansion, across Germany, across the Far East, and down to South Africa. It underscores how tactile a person he is, and why he would be wrong-footed by abstract and labyrinthine accounting shenanigans.
“I just look after the family business now,” says Steinhoff. “It’s nothing to do with furniture really. It’s some property, some farms near where I grew up. Mostly, I come into the office to shout at Renata, and keep an eye on her boyfriend,” he says, winking at his assistant of eleven years, and the immense, stuffed polar bear positioned awkwardly right next to his desk. Steinhoff has always been an enthusiastic hunter and the bear was shot 45 years ago in Alaska. It has boxing gloves – a gift, it seems, from the German middleweight champion Arthur Abraham – hanging over its paws. Behind his desk, there are pictures of him with Jooste, Christo Wiese and other South Africans on a hunting trip somewhere in South Africa.
You can see why Westerstede, with its laid-back small-town character, would be a perfect refuge for Bruno Steinhoff. It’s a world away from the hysteria surrounding the company evident at the brasseries in Cape Town, the grillhouses of Sandton or the boutique art galleries of Stellenbosch. In Germany, you get the idea few people have any sense of the wildfire overseas linked to the Steinhoff name. Ask anyone in any of Westerstede’s cottage stores, populated by the usual assortment of bicycles, carved wooden toys and picture books of rhododendrons, and they’ll gush about how Steinhoff has done so fantastically well, and remains the biggest employer in the area. Few people know of the explosion in December 2017. “I’m still a hero here in Germany,” says Steinhoff. “Here, nobody says shit about Bruno Steinhoff – they say I’m correct in what I did. I’m still an ambassador for Westerstede, and I’m very happy with that.”
He’s particularly proud of that accolade. Newspaper photographs in 2016 show a beaming Steinhoff, standing alongside Westerstede’s mayor Klaus Groß, holding up the certificate that mandates him to act as an “ambassador” for Westerstede’s business sector.7 Groß gushed at the time: “We wanted to give Westerstede a face and find someone who represents the city to the outside.”
Whether Bruno Steinhoff’s presence today, as a representative of the small town, would induce the same sort of confidence that Groß wanted at the time is unclear. He hasn’t been back to South Africa in months, though he says he plans to return soon with a small group of friends who together have become a crew of amateur cyclists. They plan to ride the Cape Argus tour, a 110-kilometre cycle event held in March each year. “Last year, I stopped because there was an awful storm. But my group of about ten people are all coming to do the Argus this year,” he says. Cycling is now one of Bruno’s big passions. In June 2018, his cycling crew rode more than 400 kilometres from Westerstede to the tiny island of Sylt in northern Germany, a stone’s throw from Denmark.8
Today, months after Steinhoff’s implosion, Bruno Steinhoff has made hardly any progress in understanding what had happened. In all his years, he says, he’s never seen such a level of duplicity. “For me, it was a big surprise. I had no sense that this was possible. But even Christo, who is a good man, he lost most of his money. Me as well.”
It is especially bruising since Steinhoff was perhaps the closest to Jooste of anyone outside Markus’s family. “From the beginning, I found him to be a wonderful man. Markus would also tell people: ‘This is my father.’ And to me, I thought of myself as his father.” Those close to Jooste say this is no misty-eyed exaggeration, softened by sentiment and time. “I’ve known them both for years,” says one veteran of the company, “and Markus really was his adopted son. The relationship was that strong. So, what happened in the end, you can imagine what that was like for Bruno.”
This is why the wound is so deep. Sitting in his office, where he’d spent many hours with Jooste, Steinhoff says, “I don’t understand how Markus did that.” But it probably helps that he’s been stepping back from the company for years. “I’m out of the business now. For me, Steinhoff is history. I hope this company survives. I’m not happy with what happened, but I can do nothing. But my thing is, I’m looking forward without Steinhoff.”
Perhaps, but it’s been a bruising way for him to mark his fifth decade with the company that bears his name. So, he remains hesitant about returning to South Africa. “Now, with my name, I’m not so interested in going to South Africa. I am Steinhoff, so . . .” He trails off, but it’s clear what he means.
3
The Cult of Markus
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There was little to suggest, at least initially, that Markus Jooste, the polite and mild-mannered accounting whizz-kid who had introduced himself to Bruno Steinhoff that day in Westerstede, would become the central figure in what could turn out to be South Africa’s greatest con.
Jooste had grown up in the country’s capital, Pretoria, finishing school at the government-run Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, known as Affies, in 1978. In those days, there wasn’t a huge amount of money in the Jooste household: his father worked as a civil servant for the Post Office in Bosman Street, in central Pretoria. It is clear that Jooste idolised his father, who, he said, would spend hours helping him with his homework. “He put his whole life into his children,” he said during an interview in 2016. “He couldn’t afford other things, so that probably helped a lot. He built that drive to be successful.”1
Jooste’s father, however, liked a flutter on the ponies apparently. In those days, there was a betting shop called Tattersalls next to the Post Office in Pretoria. So, on race days, Markus would go with his father to Tattersalls to take a punt. “The experience was totally different in those days. You listened to the commentary via radio. At the age of 12, I was what you call a runner – the guy who ran between bookmakers with tickets laying off their bets with each other.”2 It was exhilarating for the boy to see wads of money being won and lost in an instant, but the betting left a bad taste in his mouth. It stuck with Jooste, so much so that when he later bought racehorses himself, he’d proclaim