Steinheist: New book by Rob Rose focuses on the biggest corporate scandal in South Africa’s history
NB Publishers has signed Financial Mail editor Rob Rose to write an explosive new book on the Steinhoff saga.
To be published before the end of the year, Rose’s book is titled Steinheist: Inside SA’s Biggest Corporate Fraud.
It will be published under the Tafelberg imprint, which was also the publisher of Jacques Pauw’s bestselling The President’s Keepers last year.
Press release:
Steinheist will tell the tale of Steinhoff’s spectacular crash, which wiped billions off the net worth of South African tycoons such as Christo Wiese and GT Ferreira, and off the pension funds of millions of ordinary South Africans, shortly before Christmas last year. Rose has already interviewed key players in Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa.
Rose has been writing about similar financial scandals in South Africa for nearly two decades. After earning a law degree, he took on the corporate governance and finance beat at Business Day before moving to the Financial Mail in 2007, where he exposed the Barry Tannenbaum Ponzi scheme. Later at the Sunday Times, he investigated shady contracts awarded by Fifa as part of the 2010 World Cup and was part of the team that exposed corruption involving Dina Pule, which led to her dismissal as telecommunications minister.
Rose has won numerous awards, including the Sanlam Financial Journalist of the Year, and the Taco Kuiper award for investigative journalism. His first book was The Grand Scam: How Barry Tannenbaum Conned South Africa’s Business Elite.
This book is set to expose how Steinhoff, a darling of international investors until December last year, became the equivalent of South Africa’s Enron. After CEO Markus Jooste resigned amid apparent accounting fraud, the shock waves reverberated around the world as tales of fast living, race horses, a mistress and the ‘Stellenbosch mafia’ hit the headlines.
How did Jooste construct the scheme? Who was in on it? Was Steinhoff’s high-powered board deceived or party to the play? As investors and regulators continue to tally up the cost, no one is better placed that Rose to get to the bottom of the biggest corporate scandal in South Africa’s history.
Categories Non-fiction South Africa South African Current Affairs
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