The storied Lanzerac wine farm — which, in 1692, became only the third wine estate to be planted in Stellenbosch — is named after a French general, Charles Lanrezac, who boasted that he knew only three English phrases: "beautiful woman"; "kiss me quick"; and "beefsteak and potatoes".
Quite why Katharine English bought the farm (then called Schoongezicht) in 1914, and promptly renamed it after Le Général, is a mystery, though numerous accounts hint salaciously at the "intimacy" between them — a natural deduction, given Lanrezac’s range of English phrases.
In recent years, an even greater mystery has stalked the wine farm: does Markus Jooste, the mastermind of SA’s greatest fraud, secretly own it?
This has been the suspicion ever since Jooste, the former CEO of Steinhoff, negotiated the purchase of the wine farm from its former owner, Christo Wiese, in 2011, for R220m.
Two years ago, Wiese told me that Jooste had come to him and said: "Look, I’m putting together a consortium, and we’ll buy Lanzerac from you."
Jooste’s fingerprints then vanished. Instead, the Jersey-based businessman and racehorse owner Malcolm King, and his daughter Paula, popped up as the only directors of Lanzerac Investments.
King, a dough-faced and enigmatic Englishman reported to live in the Cotswolds, was introduced to Jooste in the late 1990s by businessman Gary Harlow, and they hit it off.
With a shared interest in racing (they co-owned horses, including Breedsbreeze and Nictory Vote), hunting (King apparently once boasted that there were only six animals he hadn’t shot) and tax havens, there was common ground.
But when the FM asked King in 2018 about the ownership of Lanzerac, his lawyer was adamant that the wine farm was "purchased by Pavilion Capital" — a company supposedly run by King. And he was just as adamant that Jooste "does not have an interest in Pavilion Capital".
Few people believed it. And as stories mushroomed of Jooste being spotted at Lanzerac in recent months, the rumours resurfaced.
Now, in new court papers, Steinhoff has bluntly claimed as much: that King was just a front, and Jooste was Lanzerac’s real owner from the start.
In the documents, first obtained by Fin24’s dogged Jan Cronje, two of Steinhoff’s European subsidiaries have lodged claims in the UK High Court of Justice against King and his company Formal for about €93.5m, saying they, along with Jooste, "conspired to defraud the Steinhoff entities".
These court papers spell out how Jooste’s network of ‘associates’ helped him fleece the company
The papers say a company called "The Danesfort Settlement, of which Jooste and his wife are named beneficial owners, indirectly owns Pavilion Properties … [which] changed its name to Pavilion Capital Investments on 18 January 2012".
They conclude: "Lanzerac is a subsidiary of Pavilion, which is ultimately owned by Jooste, via the Danesfort Settlement."
Though the FM reported on Danesfort’s holding in Pavilion in 2018, the fact that Steinhoff is now tackling King on this sleight of hand shows that King’s time in the shadows, as Jooste’s consigliere, is drawing to a close.
(Wiese, it turns out, is also suing Jooste for Lanzerac to be returned to him, arguing he was duped into the sale.)
The court papers are signed by Steinhoff CEO Louis du Preez, and if he’s right, King has been party to the Steinhoff schlenter from the start — if not one of the architects.
While the Lanzerac deal is an eloquent metaphor for the labyrinthine fraud, these court papers actually go much further, spelling out to a far greater extent how Jooste’s network of "associates" helped him fleece the company.
They detail how money belonging to Steinhoff’s shareholders was shifted around, through various entities, like Fihag Finanz und Handels — a shadowy Swiss company first owned by Bruno Steinhoff, but then controlled by Jooste and King. "Fihag was used by Jooste and/or King to channel the Steinhoff entities’ funds to other entities [associated with them] or to disguise the involvement of the Steinhoff group entities in certain transactions," the papers say,
There are excerpts of e-mails in which Jooste instructs King, Siegmar Schmidt (former head of Steinhoff Europe) and Dirk Schreiber (former finance director of Steinhoff Europe) how to shift cash around.
For example, in June 2010, King e-mails Jooste, saying they should keep "the books straight", and Jooste replies: "Let’s leave the crooks money out of this for the moment, as I understand it is in a Fihag account under your control, let’s leave it like that, and can discuss in SA how to handle that."
In August 2011, Jooste tells Schmidt they must remove any Steinhoff reference when dealing with Fihag. A month later, Schreiber then says he is "not feeling very comfortable". But Jooste replies: "Nobody must pay anything unless I say so."
And in June 2013, Jooste e-mails King, discussing how money should be moved out of Fihag so that it ends up with Steinhoff at year-end for "cash management" purposes — hinting at the bid to manipulate Steinhoff’s balance sheet.
Elsewhere, in June 2012, Jooste tells King he doesn’t want to reveal King’s involvement in a property scheme involving Steinhoff "for obvious reasons for all the other things we do together", and adds: "Don’t repeat what I say."
This particular property scheme took place through a company called Wanchai, which was part-owned by King and Steinhoff. Through this scheme, Steinhoff’s properties were "sold", repeatedly, with their values increasing or decreasing to allow the financials to be manipulated.
King, famously curt and elusive, clearly never thought his time in the Steinhoff spotlight would come. But it seems like it may just be time for him to share a bottle or two of Lanzerac’s Le Général red with his lawyers.
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