Analysis: Has the South African Reserve Bank gone rogue?

An extraordinary multibillion-rand battle is raging between the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the surviving rump of the Steinhoff group, now called Ibex.

Despite being fought out under the watchful eye of the Pretoria high court, this bitter “lawfare” is largely hidden and unreported.

This is mainly because of the extraordinary breadth and complexity of the litigation – and because of the SARB’s insistence that much of its evidence must be redacted for public consumption, despite the fact that it is being accused of using its draconian public powers in a destructive and arbitrary way.

It is the SARB’s resort, so far unexplained, to what seems like a crude power play to prevent Steinhoff/Ibex from repaying its foreign debts, that smacks of Trumpism.

The courts, however, have pushed back, with judge Sulet Potterill this past week delivering a swingeing rebuke of the bank in Steinhoff’s so-called 0433 case, to which we’ll return.

Yet, as the judge noted, the attitude of the SARB was displayed by a remark from the bank’s counsel in open court that if the SARB’s case was dismissed on a lack of facts – which is what happened – they will just come back to court and try again.

Consequences

If it persists, the SARB’s approach will have far-reaching consequences.

It will likely make it far more difficult for South African companies to borrow from foreign lenders, who may fear that the SARB will intervene in the way the bank has done with Steinhoff – by simply blocking cash from leaving the country and then attempting the forfeiture of multibillion-rand chunks.

Of course, the SARB issue with Steinhoff is intimately bound up with the massive fraud that was perpetrated on investors, shareholders, lenders – and the SARB itself – by the previous management under the late Markus Jooste.

An important part of that fraud was various misrepresentations that the then controllers of Steinhoff made to the SARB, especially around the offshore listing of the Steinhoff Group on the Frankfurt stock exchange in December 2016.

Nonetheless, as we’ll try to explain, the new management – as far as we can establish from the court records – has been diligent about consulting with the SARB and seeking its approval for a multifaceted restructuring and settlement process.

After Jooste resigned and the Steinhoff share price tanked, the new management under CEO Louis du Preez set about trying to stabilise the cross-border octopus that Steinhoff had become, unravel the massive fraud and the flow of funds, hold creditors at bay and keep the business running in the hope of saving it.

The company faced a barrage of litigation from enraged shareholders and regulators.

It needed time and access to assets to negotiate a “global settlement”, which eventually included partial compensation for various classes of shareholders and a rescheduling of the foreign debt.  

These arrangements with claimants and creditors sought, on the face of it, to prevent the liquidation and collapse of the group – which would likely have had severe consequences, including for local banks, as well as Steinhoff businesses and their employees.

The SARB seemingly went along, approving and authorising the necessary company restructuring, debt rescheduling and all the associated foreign exchange liabilities that this entailed.

Then, in 2023, something changed.

But before we get there, a detour on some of the other fundamental issues this matter raises.

Secrecy on steroids

This article is styled as an analysis and contains no comment from either Steinhoff or the SARB.

That is unusual for amaBhungane because we generally seek a detailed explanation from the subjects of critical reportage.

In this case, however, the SARB has taken a hostile attitude to public accountability around the far-reaching powers it wields – and has used the apartheid-era secrecy provisions of the 1989 SARB Act to back up its stance.

That legislation, in section 33, criminalises unauthorised disclosure of so-called “confidential information”, even by third parties like journalists. It provides for a fine or up to a year’s imprisonment or both.

In its legal disputes with Steinhoff, the SARB has placed its own purported interest in secrecy above the principle of open justice, insisting on a “confidentiality” regime in which the public versions of the court papers are filled with redactions at the instance of the bank.

Steinhoff went to court in December 2023 to review the SARB’s decision to impose what Steinhoff calls a “blanket transfer ban” imposed by the bank on Steinhoff’s cross-border transactions (we will get back to this crucial development).

As is standard in such reviews, Steinhoff then requested the “record of decision” – in other words, all the documents and communications that the SARB relied on when deciding to issue the “blanket transfer ban”, which Steinhoff argues impermissibly revoked previous foreign exchange permissions granted in pursuit of the global settlement and restructuring.

Since the 2015 Sanral judgment at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), in which amaBhungane was one of the joint amici (friends of the court), the default position has been that “all court records are … public documents that are open to public scrutiny at all times. … [A]ny departure is an exception and must be justified.”

“Secrecy”, the SCA held, “is the very antithesis of accountability. It prevents the public from knowing what decision was made, why it was made, and whether it was justifiable.” 

However, without seeking a court order, the SARB asserted confidentiality over the entire record of its decision and blocked access until Steinhoff agreed to treat it as confidential.

The SARB has persisted with this approach in the face of a subsequent application by Steinhoff to the court seized with this review to set aside the confidentiality regime.

In an affidavit opposing the lifting of secrecy, SARB acting head of financial surveillance (FinSurv) Tsumbedzo Nevhutanda argues: “Steinhoff may not disclose the SARB’s written communication marked as confidential: Steinhoff’s representatives who may in any way have come into possession of such document, are forbidden … from disclosing any communication the SARB has marked as confidential or secret.”

“At the outset of the matter, the SARB was faced with competing imperatives: the need to preserve the inherent confidentiality of the SARB record – in circumstances where an outright denial of access would not have been a sustainable position in the review litigation.”

The SARB therefore decided (unilaterally) that a “confidentiality regime” would be appropriate.

The court has yet to rule on this, but given the SARB’s aggressive tactics in litigation with Steinhoff, amaBhungane has opted not to forewarn the bank of our reporting.

We have also, for the same reasons, restricted ourselves to what is on the “public” (redacted) court record, selected parts of which we also publish today in the interests of promoting a proper public assessment of the bank’s conduct.

• 0433 Review application – full court bundle (NB: 93mb)
• Scanned judgment – Ibex Investment Holdings Ltd and others v SARB and others 2024-085397-OCR

It remains to be seen whether the SARB’s secretiveness is a result of a bona fide public policy reason, as it claims, or is a bid to hide its missteps and abuses, as Steinhoff claims.

To understand that debate – and the extraordinary saga it foregrounds – we need to go back to 2023 and the run up to the “blanket transfer ban”.

When something changed

Du Preez, the current Ibex/Steinhoff CEO, has set out his version of the historical narrative in what is the latest of four broad swathes of litigation between the company and the SARB – which all include many legal subplots – as we’ll see.

This latest case is an urgent application launched in February this year – and its tone conveys the remarkable breakdown in trust between Ibex and the SARB that has taken place over the past three years.

Du Preez states under oath: “This is an urgent application to review and set aside male fide administrative action taken by the Reserve Bank on Monday 10 February … in cynical disregard and contempt of the relief that Ibex sought in related pending proceedings, which were to be argued in this court just two days later on Wednesday 12 February 2025.”

Du Preez was objecting, vehemently, to the SARB’s order issued on that Monday freezing some R14bn (yes, R14bn) worth of Pepkor shares owned by Ibex (through a subsidiary called Ainsley) – and which the beleaguered company needs to sell down in order to repay its remaining foreign creditors. 

In his affidavit in what we’ll call “the Ainsley case”, Du Preez sets out how Steinhoff got to this point.

What we will also try to understand later in this piece, peering through the redactions, is how the bank got there.

Du Preez states: “Since early 2018, Ibex has been engaged in a restructuring and settlement process in terms of which Ibex has sought to minimise the harm sustained by Ibex stakeholders on account of the accounting irregularities committed by the former Steinhoff management pre-December 2017 …

“This process has had to be done in a number of stages, and at each stage (a) the Reserve Bank has granted various approvals, and (b) Ibex’s international financial creditors, who became entitled to full repayment of the debt owed to them after the accounting irregularities were uncovered, have relied on the Reserve Bank’s involvement and approvals, and on that basis agreed to defer the maturity date of their debt, allowing other stakeholders to be settled first.”

Let’s pause here.

The resignation of Jooste, the revelation of his frauds and the crash in the share price led to the Steinhoff Group’s external debt becoming due – a default in excess of €10bn (at the time, more than R150bn).

As Du Preez notes: “These circumstances significantly threatened the Group’s resources and continued existence. Catastrophic consequences would have followed for the Group and its stakeholders if an uncontrolled liquidation had taken place, including a forced sale and significant loss of value of the Group’s assets, a loss to financial institutions including South African banks which were owed significant debt, and extensive job losses in South Africa and abroad.”

Elsewhere Du Preez puts the exposure of South African lenders then at about R28.8bn.

It seems the SARB was alive to the systemic risks and supported efforts to save the company.

Du Preez notes: “Before January 2023, Ibex had productive engagements with the Reserve Bank in the process of designing, getting approvals for, and implementing a variety of transactions aimed at assuaging the catastrophic consequences of the near collapse of the Steinhoff Group following December 2017.”

This included repaying the full R28.8bn owed to South African lenders.

Moving target

But the goal posts shifted on both sides.

Du Preez says Ibex’s efforts to reduce its foreign debt burden were stymied by macroeconomic factors, such as Covid, the war in Ukraine, escalating inflation and rising interest rates.

The global settlement had given the group a fighting chance, but by 2022 it was clear it would not be able to repay or refinance the offshore debt due in June 2023.

In December 2022, the financial creditors agreed to further extend the maturity date for the debt to June 2026, but only on condition that the group undergo an equity reorganisation that would give them the ultimate economic interest in the group’s assets.

Essentially this was to be a managed winding up, implemented through a court-approved process in the Netherlands called a WHOA restructuring.

In his affidavit, Du Preez asserts that “this equity reorganisation was necessary in order to allow the debt owed to the to the financial creditors to be discharged to the greatest extent possible (which would be far less than the face value of the debt in December 2017)”.

According to Du Preez, Ibex (Steinhoff) had already obtained SARB approval in October 2020 and November 2021 to make the payments due to the financial creditors as part of the global settlement – and this was confirmed again in November 2022.

But, pending the WHOA restructuring, it seems it dawned on the SARB that there would be nothing left in the kitty: Ibex planned to monetise all of its international and South African assets for the repayment of the group’s external debt before June 30 2026. (This included the Pepkor shares held by Ainsley, which was the group’s largest asset in South Africa.)

This should not have been an enormous surprise to the SARB, given, as Du Preez asserts elsewhere, the bank “was aware … since early 2018” that Steinhoff’s obligations to its financial creditors exceeded its assets.

Nevertheless, in other litigation the bank claims: “The requests by the Steinhoff Group to restructure its debt and delist from the JSE were not previously proposed by Steinhoff or expected by FinSurv.”

Du Preez sets out in detail the briefings given to the SARB between January and March 2023 about what the final debt restructuring would entail, which Ibex/Steinhoff argued was not materially different to what the financial surveillance department had already approved.

He states: “On 6 March 2023 … Ibex set out the cross-border cash flows that had already been paid, and cash flows that still needed to occur, pursuant to the Global Settlement.”

The presentation to the SARB noted that given three payments under the global settlement (€212.5m, €164m and €1.581bn) had already been specifically approved, “we assume that we may continue with repayments without requiring further FinSurv approval”.

But the bank baulked.

As Du Preez puts it: “Just a few days later … no doubt prompted by this letter reminding the Reserve Bank of its prior approvals, the Reserve Bank issued the blanket transfer ban on 9 March 2023 as an unlawful method of frustrating the implementation of its prior approvals.”

That set off the extraordinary chain of litigation by Steinhoff and rearguard action by the bank, which we’ll get to.

But there was another development that shifted the goal posts from the SARB side: its investigation of the violations committed by the previous management of Steinhoff.

At the same time that Ibex had been undergoing the restructuring and settlement process, the Reserve Bank, through its lawyers at Bowmans, had been conducting a probe into alleged exchange control contraventions during the Jooste era.

Mistrust

It was the Bowmans inquiry that seems to have undermined trust between the bank and the new management at Steinhoff/Ibex – and Bowmans’ findings form the bedrock of the SARB’s attempts since 2023 to penalise Steinhoff for its past sins.

Du Preez explains that he was formally told of the bank’s investigation in a SARB letter on  December 5 2018: “Over the next few years Ibex responded to some 23 request for information in terms of Regulation 19 of the exchange control regulations, providing extensive information to the Reserve Bank for the purposes of its investigation.”

These requests (which are backed up by the threat of criminal sanction) were quite invasive, including requests for access to all emails and records stored on any Steinhoff server pertaining to a set of listed individuals, which of course included Jooste, but also Du Preez himself, who had joined Steinhoff in mid-2017 – about six months before the crash – as general counsel.

On December 29 2020, the SARB also asked Du Preez for a list of “all bank account(s) registered in your name, on your behalf by another person or entity and/or any entity or trust directly or indirectly linked to you from 2009-01-01 to date” – as well as details of all his cross-border travel from the beginning of 2008 to the end of 2017.

Despite this, as far as we could establish, the new Ibex/Steinhoff management is not anywhere in court papers accused of not co-operating with or being obstructive to the bank’s investigation.

Ibex also provided the SARB with access to the report and working papers of its own commissioned investigation, led by PwC, from as early as June 2019 – though this was shared under a confidentiality regime.

On the SARB’s own version, by about March/April 2023, its own (Bowmans-led) investigation was substantially complete – and it appears, in so far unexplained fashion, to have flipped a switch at the SARB, turning the bank from being careful but supportive, to being hostile and intemperate.

We say unexplained for several reasons.

First, there are indications in the court papers that Bowmans had kept its clients at the bank in the loop throughout the process, so the outlines of what had taken place at Steinhoff under Jooste could not have come as a complete surprise to the finance technicians at the SARB.

If Bowmans had uncovered some shocking new revelation, implicating the new management and evidencing some kind of double dealing since Du Preez took over as CEO, then one might understand the dramatic shift.

Yet, as we’ll see, from what can be gleaned from the redacted papers, Bowmans’ probe delivered nothing like this – and the bank’s analysis of the exchange control violations it now wants to lay at Steinhoff’s door is in some respects quite crude, as Ibex repeatedly argues in its defence.    

Second, the SARB adopts an inexplicably heavy-handed procedural response – which has seen it conceding and flip-flopping in the course of the extraordinary series of blunt administrative manoeuvres and sharp legal skirmishes that the Bowman’s report unleashed.

A series of unfortunate events

Du Preez takes up the narrative: “As a result of the outcome of the investigation, and based on the alleged historic contraventions, the Reserve Bank issued two blocking orders in May 2023 over funds held in Ibex bank accounts, in the amount of approximately ZAR 5.7 billion.”

The SARB provided reasons for the blocking orders in a letter on June 15 2023, stating that the funds were blocked on account of the investigation findings and the reasonable suspicion that Ibex entities had engaged in various exchange control contraventions that took place before December 2017. We will return to these conclusions and Ibex’s response.

Du Preez’s affidavit continues: “The combination of the blanket transfer ban and the blocking of the vast majority of Ibex’s available cash had the effect of undermining and revoking the prior approvals granted by the Reserve Bank with the result that Ibex could no longer rely on the approvals granted under the Global Settlement to make payments to the financial creditors as it was supposed to.”

After a series of engagements with the bank, Ibex challenged the transfer ban and the blocking orders by launching review proceedings in the Pretoria high court on December 1 2023 – the first of the four major pieces of litigation against the SARB.

In what Ibex characterises as a reaction to this initial review, the bank on December 13 2023 wrote to Ibex indicating its intention to order the forfeit of the blocked funds (and some additional amounts, termed “the trapped funds”, which were also being contested in the review).

Ibex made detailed submissions on the proposed forfeiture and raised various requests for clarification. The SARB never responded.

The company’s lawyers also wrote to the bank requesting an undertaking not to issue a forfeiture order while the whole basis of the blocking orders on the same funds was under legal review. This undertaking would avoid Ibex having to go to court for an urgent order interdicting the forfeiture.

Bowmans, on behalf of the bank, gave an undertaking that the SARB would provide “reasonable prior notice” before it acted.

Du Preez explains what happened: “Some 5 months later, at approximately 15h30 on 18 July 2024, Bowmans wrote to Webber Wentzel [Ibex’s lawyers] stating that the Reserve bank intended to take a decision to forfeit the blocked funds, which decision would be communicated ‘in due course’ … The very next morning, after this terse and opaque letter, forfeiture orders were published in the Government Gazette, with Ibex being given no realistic opportunity whatsoever, much less ‘reasonable notice’, to protect its rights.”

This cavalier action appears to have come back to bite the bank, as we’ll see.  

Meanwhile, Ibex was also wrangling with the SARB in the review to get the bank to disclose a full record of what informed its blocking decisions (eventually being forced to accept the SARB’s confidentiality regime).

Nevertheless, Ibex decided it could not wait for the outcome of the review to pursue the debt restructuring.

So, despite the fraught legal exchanges with the bank, in February 2024 Ibex essentially reapplied to the SARB for new permission to make the foreign payments it needed to in terms of the Dutch WHOA winding up process. (It set to one side for this purpose the company’s legal stance that these payments had already previously been approved.)

This was application 0433, which sought to establish with certainty that if Ibex sold off its South African assets in an orderly fashion (predominantly the Pepkor shares held by subsidiary Ainsley) then it would be allowed by the SARB to export the proceeds to settle its foreign debt by the new deadline of June 2026.

What happened with application 0433 was simply bizarre.

Du Preez states: “On 11 April 2024, having first sought and considered further detailed information regarding the implementation of the WHOA plan from Ibex in March 2024, the Reserve Bank approved Application 0433 and granted permission for Ibex to expatriate funds received by the Ibex Group in the future in respect of South African assets, to settle its foreign commitments by approving 5 categories of payments for which Ibex had sought permission.”

Ibex relied on the approvals granted by the SARB and sold 500-million of its Pepkor shares, realising more than R9bn on June 24.

However, before Ibex could begin making payments to foreign creditors the bank stepped in to prevent this, despite the 0433 approvals.

On June 26, Ibex heard from FirstRand, its forex exchange dealer, that it had received an urgent request to refer any intended payment to the SARB first.

On July 2 2024, FirstRand reported to Ibex that the Reserve Bank claimed it was not aware that assets were to be sold and proceeds exported. FirstRand further conveyed that the deputy governor had stated that under no circumstances would money leave the country without her consent.

This was a shock, as that was precisely what the 0433 application approved by the SARB had set out.

The SARB then raised a series of spurious objections (they were never raised again in the subsequent 0433 court case) to which Ibex gave responses.

When Ibex gave notice it would approach a court for urgent relief, the bank responded on July 25 2024 by issuing new blocking orders over the R9bn Ibex had raised.

The 0433 blocking orders triggered an urgent application by Ibex for the Reserve Bank to uplift the blocking orders, and be prevented from taking further steps to frustrate the debt repayment plan, including the issuance of any further blocking or attachment orders.

These are the “0433 proceedings” on which judge Potterill has just pronounced – and which we’ll come to in more detail.

Ibex also instated proceedings to set aside and review the roughly R6bn forfeiture decisions communicated on July 19 2024.

The weakness of the SARB’s 0433 case was suggested by the fact that on September 19 it reached a settlement agreement allowing the export of the R9bn in accordance with the terms of the 0433 approval.

As Du Preez explains in his affidavit, certain disputes in the 0433 case remained, including Ibex’s right to sell and expatriate proceeds of the remaining Pepkor shares still held by Ainsley under the approvals granted in application 0433.

The Reserve Bank, by way of a counter application, sought to review and set aside its own 0433 approvals on the basis they were granted by a SARB official without the required authority.

Which takes us back to the latest litigation, the Ainsley case.

Du Preez explains it was agreed that the 0433 proceedings and the Reserve Bank’s self-review would be argued on February 12 and 13 2025: “It was just two days before this hearing that the Reserve Bank issued the PPH [Pepkor] prohibition order, which to the extent of R14 billion, anticipates and renders nugatory the relief sought in the 0433 proceedings.”

In other words, even before the case was argued, the bank sought to insulate itself from an adverse outcome by issuing a new blocking order.

Du Preez asserts: “This conduct … was part of what has emerged to be a pattern of  reactive, male fide, and unlawful conduct by the Reserve Bank towards Ibex, in which the Reserve Bank abuses the powers given to it in the Exchange Control Regulations to frustrate not only Ibex acting in accordance with prior Reserve Bank approvals, but also impede court oversight of its actions.”

The bank gets a bollocking

While it is true that on the Ainsley case we have only heard from Du Preez and Ibex, the application traverses ground where the SARB has already had its say.

In that respect the Potterill judgment on the 0433 case should be a wake-up call, given its brutal findings about the SARB’s credibility and bona fides. Sadly, the bank may not listen, despite Potterill’s best efforts to make it hear.

Ibex had asked the court not only to uplift the blocking order but to direct the SARB not to take any steps to prevent Ibex from making further payments on the 0433 approvals, including barring the bank from issuing new attachment orders on the same assets.

The SARB argued this would be going too far.

Potterill countered: “It was made clear by counsel for the SARB that the SARB could render an order for payment of the [0433] by this Court worthless by issuing a blocking order the day after this Court issued its order. In terms of the SARB’s functions and powers this is true, but a Court has to ensure that its own order is obeyed, and if it is not going to be obeyed, that there is means to ensure compliance. This is especially so where this Court has found that the SARB has not been candid in these applications and the blocking order issued was unlawful. A blocking order’s purpose is not to prevent payments that the SARB had approved. If a further blocking is issued as a means to prevent the payment that the SARB had approved it is not the Court usurping the powers of the SARB, but the SARB abusing its powers.”

This is presumably why, even prior to the matter being argued, the bank did exactly that: preempting Potterill’s decision by freezing the remaining Pepkor shares.

The bank is now de facto in contempt of Potterill’s order. Will it recognise that and lift the freezing order – or will it dig in and lodge an appeal, banking on the fact that the Ainsley case is at an early stage and is to be heard by a different judge?

The signs are not hopeful. Put another way, Potterill’s adverse inferences are not drawn from thin air but from a pattern of the bank’s behaviour that the judge found wanting.

So, in seeking to review its own 0433 approvals, the SARB refused to get into the merits of the approvals and chose to rely solely on the claim that the decision was taken by one senior official, the luckless Johan Kruger, who lacked the necessary authorisation and who has now been suspended, according to the bank.

This got short shrift from the judge.

She noted: “The full extent of the facts set out by the SARB is that it received [0433] in February 2024 and the approval was granted in April 2024. Not a single fact is set out as to who received or considered it …

“The SARB did not set out the conduct of Kruger to enable a determination of what he did. The averment that Kruger granted the approval is not supported by a single document, least of all by Kruger himself … The deponent to the answering affidavit, Mr Nevhutanda, the acting Head of Department of Finsurv, does not say that that he was unaware of [0433].

“There are no affidavits from Kruger, the unidentified Divisional Head and any of the members of the GEC [the SARB governor’s executive committee] to confirm that they had no knowledge of [0433]. There are no supporting affidavits from the … [other] respondents to support the version of Nevhutanda.”

Elsewhere she noted: “There is not a single document supporting the contention that the approval was granted without authority by Kruger or the DH. There are no internal emails, no minutes of meetings or any document attached that [show] Kruger granted the 0433 and in a rogue manner.”

The judge said she understood that, to achieve some of its objectives, the SARB has draconian powers to ensure compliance with its purpose, mandate and regulations – and that the Ibex group’s actions stood to be scrutinised.

“However, I am mystified that an organ of state, when confronted with reviews … relating to its approvals and blocking order, sets out none of the required facts to enable a Court to decide whether these decisions were lawful, procedurally fair and should not be reviewed and set aside. An organ of state is not above the law and a Court can only decide on what is on the papers before it.”

Reading the judgment, one is left with the strong impression that the bank did not present a case because it did not have one, and was instead content to resort to a kind of administrative Stalingrad strategy by simply issuing the Ainsley freezing order.

Where does this intransigence come from?

To try to understand that, you have to look at what the SARB investigated, what it looked for, what it found – and what it is perhaps still looking for.

The case against Steinhoff, Jooste et al  

The first thing to note is that, despite the opening up of the economy post-1994, the Reserve Bank is still enmeshed in the cross-border economy – to a quite byzantine extent that outsiders may not be aware of.

Potterill’s judgment quotes from the landmark SARB case against Mark Shuttleworth, in which the Constitutional Court noted: “Here we are dealing with exchange control legislation. Its avowed purpose was to curb or regulate the export of capital from the country. The very historic origins of the Act, in 1933, were in the midst of the 1929 Great Depression, pointing to a necessity to curb outflows of capital. The Regulations were then passed in the aftermath of the economic crises following the Sharpeville shootings in 1960. The domestic economy had to be shielded from capital flight … The plain dominant purpose of the measure was to regulate and discourage the export of capital and to protect the domestic economy.”

Much of that murky architecture is still in place: the bank’s edicts are binding; its internal processes are obscure; and its reliance on secrecy is sustained, with great tracts of the SARB evidence in the four Steinhoff matters redacted for public consumption.

Nevertheless, thanks to the Ibex litigation, there are several places where the SARB case against Steinhoff – as well as the outline of its broader investigations – appear unredacted.

In particular there is the SARB’s December 13 2023 communication setting out its reasons why the R6bn it had frozen should be forfeit.

This runs to 40 pages, while Ibex’s detailed rebuttal on behalf of Steinhoff (to which it apparently never received a reply) runs to 136 pages.

It is beyond our scope to unpick the two versions, but some impressions stand out.

If one has regard to the PwC forensic, Jooste and his tight group of cronies created a highly complex financial hall of mirrors, where it was purposely made difficult follow the money and separate the genuine from the fake – and though this process was often done on the fly between a few selected conspirators, it was also often backed up by sophisticated legal and financial expertise and instruments.

Ibex itself says in its submissions that “it has become apparent to Steinhoff that, in the years before December 2017, Mr Jooste caused the Group – under his direction to engage in certain fictitious and irregular accounting and transactions that formed part of a scheme of mismanagement, market manipulation, misstatements and misrepresentations which substantially and artificially inflated the Group’s profit and asset values.”

It is clear that the SARB has struggled to pin down the detail of what exactly this meant for the prospect of isolating exchange control violations – and has resorted in some cases to broad brush strokes, which do not seem to gain much traction in the face of Ibex’s counter arguments.

As Ibex notes: “FinSurv references transaction values that are extremely large, and which bear no relation to amounts that actually left South Africa in each transaction, even if there may have been contraventions of the Regulations in certain respects …”

But the core problem for the bank is that it, quite responsibly, elected early on to try to help clean up the mess Steinhoff rather than pick apart the bones.

So the SARB granted approvals necessary for the restructuring and repaying the foreign debt – even though it already had access, with the new Steinhoff management’s assistance, to the facts that underlie most, if not all, of the alleged transgressions.

Ibex argues: “The Reserve Bank therefore had sufficient information before it, in relation to the alleged past transgressions, to be in a position [to] withhold the approvals if those transgressions in any way impacted those approvals.”

Though Ibex concedes that the SARB did reserve its rights along the way, it argues the bank cannot just rewind history now.

“A forfeiture at this stage is a punishment imposed not only on Steinhoff, but also on the financial creditors of whom the Reserve Bank is aware, on account of inter alia the prior approvals and the information provided by Steinhoff to the Reserve Bank in relation to those approvals, and to whom the majority of the funds proposed to be forfeited are due … The massive, proposed forfeiture has to, but does not, take account of these factors and will therefore be disproportionate and unlawful.”

Yet in some ways the SARB’s frustrations are understandable.

Jooste was a conman on an enormous scale who persuaded the SARB – and the markets and the Public Investment Corporation – that he was going offshore to create a global African champion, when he was really running a very sophisticated Ponzi scheme, all the while lining his pockets and those of his friends.

Now he and the money are gone – and the SARB finds itself without real recourse.

Yet, there may be another way.

Like most conmen, much of Jooste’s play relied on exploiting the greed of his “marks”, preeminently the group of superrich businessmen who invested much of their wealth in Steinhoff shares. In all the circumstances, it is hard not to suspect that Jooste’s promise of effectively offshoring assets via Steinhoff’s reverse listing on the Frankfurt stock exchange was not an effective lure.

And the man who famously invested more and lost more than anyone else was former Steinhoff chair Christo Wiese.

Wiese is still alive and he’s still rich.

And what the Steinhoff documents show us is that he is still being investigated by the SARB.

Are they on another fool’s mission? Perhaps, perhaps not – but the answer to that question will have to wait for our next Steinhoff instalment.

The amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, an independent non-profit, produced this story. Like it? Be an amaB Supporter to help us do more. Sign up for our newsletter to get more.