The SA Reserve Bank’s seizure of all assets linked to former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste including the Lanzerac wine farm in Stellenbosch has come from ‘left field’ while the NPA was ‘asleep on the job’ over the past five years.

That’s according to Paul Hoffman, a director of anti-corruption organisation Accountability Now, who like several analysts, welcomed the move to seize Jooste’s assets on Tuesday.

However, as previously reported, DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach has acknowledged that there were capacity challenges within the NPA in prosecuting complex financial crimes, but it should now be encouraged to move ahead with the Jooste case.

In the first move against Jooste, five years after the retailer imploded, the Reserve Bank on Tuesday seized more than R1.4bn worth of assets belonging to him, his wife and his family trust.

This follows last week’s Western Cape High Court order granted the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) an ex parte application to attach all assets linked Jooste who played a key role in possibly the largest corporate scandal in SA history.

Jooste is accused of causing Steinhoff’s crash through dodgy dealings costing the company over R200bn in one of the country’s biggest-ever financial scandals.

Analysts, like Hoffman, believe it will be easier for the authorities to build a case against Jooste in the perceived ‘lesser crimes’ of breaching exchange control regulations and insider trading rather than pinning him for complex international investment fraud.

The Mail & Guardian reports that SARB spokesperson Ziyanda Mtshali declined to comment on whether charges for violating exchange control regulations and fraud were looming against Jooste, although the granting of a preservation order raises suspicions that charges will follow.

Hoffman said the preservation order showed that the SARB was ‘seeking to undo money laundering and to punish people’ but the NPA had failed at its task. 

‘The NPA has been exposed as being asleep on the job as they should have gone in years ago and attached all the proceeds of crime sitting in Markus and his orbit, so good for the Reserve Bank for at least preserving the assets,’ Hoffman said.

Protea Capital Management CEO Jean Pierre Verster said he had initially thought that the easiest way to catch Jooste would be via an alleged breach of the exchange control regulations.

‘Typically, in the US, the big Ponzi scheme guys and the mafia normally don’t get caught on the crime everyone thought was bad, but they get caught on a tax issue. The true crime here is a fraud, but one way to get the people who perpetrated the complex crime is to focus on a simple crime they also committed,’ Verster said.

The M&G notes that he added that ‘when the Steinhoff bomb first burst, I thought of exchange control regulation (violations) and that it was quite a simple crime to prove and to apprehend Jooste on.’

NPA spokesperson Mthunzi Mhaga referred questions to the Directorate for Priority Investigations (DPCI, the Hawks) saying only ‘the matter is still under investigation by the DPCI’.

Full Mail & Guardian report