It is yet another shocking twist in a story of a prosaic furniture company that has provided one blockbuster cliffhanger after another, this time of honeytraps and murder set in a mansion in the English countryside.
Steinhoff, the now-imploded retailer that traces its ascent to a warehouse in Ga-Rankuwa producing Gommagomma lounge suites, has a narrative that would put the scriptwriters of The Bold and the Beautiful to shame.
It features the largest corporate fraud in South Africa (R106bn); the biggest loss by one man (Christo Wiese, R59bn); a narcissistic CEO in Markus Jooste, who secretly swindled investors for more than a decade; and, finally, Jooste’s messy suicide-by-gunshot on the rocks of Hermanus on Human Rights Day three years ago.
That Jooste had got away with it for so long was thanks to close-knit conspirators: two mild-mannered German accountants, Dirk Schreiber and Siegmar Schmidt; ex-banker George Alan Evans; and a shady British businessman, Malcolm King, who acted as a front for the purchase of wine farm Lanzerac.
But while Schmidt and Schreiber are now both in jail in Germany and Evans struck a plea deal, it seemed that King had got away scot-free. Which would be odd, given that he was so central to Steinhoff’s hall of mirrors.
The doughy chinless King, who fancied himself as a debonair “James Bond character”, was famously rude and shifty. It says much that while he’d lived in the Cotswolds for years, his registered address remained the tax shelter of Jersey.
He was also the most infamous hunter in the UK, compared with Walter Palmer, the American dentist who shot Cecil the Lion with an arrow in Zimbabwe in 2015.
At one point, King boasted to a Steinhoff director that there were only six animals in the world he hadn’t shot. Pictures of him can still be found hovering over the corpse of some or other animal, such as an endangered Konya sheep in Türkiye, or the endangered Bukharan markhor, a kind of mountain goat, in Tajikistan.
Anyway, King has now got his own. The way in which this happened – and how the hunter became the hunted – drips with irony.
In a story largely missed by the business pages, reports in the UK in April revealed that a 30-year-old Romanian woman, Adina Mihai, and her 29-year-old boyfriend, Madalin Dumitru, had been charged with poisoning and killing two people — including the 80-year-old King — two years ago.
Mihai advertised her services on an online classified website, Vivastreet, for £180 an hour, conducting an initial video meet-and-greet to identify how wealthy the clients were. King’s Rolex was an obvious drawcard, so when he invited her to his estate in the Cotswolds on August 21 2024, Mihai didn’t hesitate.
She then spiked his drink with gamma-butyrolactone, an industrial solvent used in nail polish which has been used as a date-rape drug. Once he passed out, Mihai let Dumitru into the house, where they pilfered whatever they could.
King’s family found his body the next day. Nobody suspected foul play, since he’d been ailing. But after glazing executive Gary Mouat died in a similar way nearby, the police took a deeper look – and identified Mihai as the common link.
A week ago, as the trial was about to start in the Oxford Crown Court, Dumitru and Mihai pleaded guilty, admitting to targeting men “seeking sexual services”.
Given King’s role as a notorious bagman for Jooste, as well as a grim reaper of endangered animals, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him.
Deceit and betrayal
It punctuates a story that began in the 1990s, when King first met Jooste through Gary Harlow, a businessman who was one of the first investors in Gommagomma. The two shared high-octane interests: horse racing (they co-owned two horses), hunting and, evidently, pulling a financial fast one.
King made Jooste’s heist possible in numerous ways. First, King helped Steinhoff inflate the value of its UK properties, which soared 471% from €431m in 2008, to €2.37bn in 2017. This was done by flipping properties through companies King controlled, including Wanchai Property International and Alvaglen Estates, hiking the value each time.
A forensic report by PwC later described these property deals as a “little bit crazy”. So crazy, in fact, that once Steinhoff received the PwC report, it slashed the value of its properties in half to €1.1bn.
More personally, King acted as the front man for Jooste’s purchase of wine farm Lanzerac from Wiese in 2012 for R220m. At the time Jooste said he was buying the farm, so Wiese was shocked to learn later that the buyer was Lanzerac Investments, owned by King and his daughter Paula.
When I asked King a few years ago whether he wasn’t just a front for Jooste, he denied it. He argued, falsely, that Jooste had “no interest”, but said he couldn’t say more because of “contractual confidentiality”.
This turned out to be a lie. Steinhoff lodged court papers in 2021 saying that Lanzerac was “ultimately owned by Jooste”, despite an energetic attempt to hide it.
Getting even more personal, King’s company Coy’s Properties also owned The Bantry Aparthotel in Cape Town, where Jooste’s mistress Berdine Odendaal shacked up.
After Odendaal was publicly outed, Coy’s Properties abruptly sold the Bantry Bay apartment, with King telling me this was because of “the political[ly] uncertain” environment in the country.
Alec Hogg, in a compelling report in BizNews this week on the UK convictions, described King as Jooste’s “consigliere, the man who made himself invisible”, even as he helped launder billions.
His final story, fittingly, is one of deceit and betrayal. And it adds to the pantheon of grisly endings for the architects of the Steinhoff schlenter.
ALSO READ:
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- After the fall: Jooste’s stiff upper lip
Top image collage: amaBhungane (Malcolm King); Thames Valley Police (Adina Mihai).
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