The former chief executive of Steinhoff, Markus Jooste. Picture: Reuters
Steinhoff International will be liquidated this week and will effectively cease to exist.
The date for Steinhoff to be liquidated will be October 13.
The embattled retail company will delist from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Exchange.
At 2pm the Steinhoff share price was trading at R0.03 on the JSE.
At its peak, Steinhoff was trading at R96.85 a share and had a market cap of R359.6 billion, according to the Daily Investor.
Over the last six months, the company share price has lost 85.71% of its value, and over the past year, it has lost 98.43% of its value.
The company has a debt burden of €10.2 billion (about R208 billion) and has been granted a three-year debt repayment holiday in exchange for delisting and giving over economic control to its creditors, according to News24.
In late September, a financial services tribunal found former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste liable for a R20 million penalty which was imposed on him by the Financial Services for insider trading.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in October 2022 issued a penalty of R162m but revised the amount to R20m in December 2022.
Jooste’s attorneys in September then claimed that their client was unemployed and said that he was not obtaining an income. Jooste’s team argued that the R20m fine was incorrectly calculated.
However, the reduced penalty was upheld and the former CEO will also have to pay interest on the R20m penalty.
The FSCA on 29 September 2023 stated that they welcomed the “Tribunal’s decision to dismiss Jooste application to have the revised penalty imposed on him by the FSCA reconsidered”. Therefore he would have to pay the R20m plus interest.
It was alleged that Jooste breached the Financial Markets Act when he sent Jaap du Toit, Gerhardus Burger, Marthinus Swiegelaar and the late Ockert Oosthuizen text messages warning them to sell their Steinhoff shares.
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