Steinheist

What Is Steinheist About?

Steinheist is a Showmax original documentary series about the collapse of Steinhoff International — a South African multinational holding company that imploded in 2017 after one of the most audacious accounting frauds in corporate history. Directed by SAFTA award-winning filmmaker Richard Finn Gregory and produced by Elle Oosthuizen for production company IdeaCandy, the series traces how a sprawling empire built on retail brands across multiple continents concealed an estimated R200 billion in fraudulent value from investors, pensioners, and regulators for nearly a decade.

The original three-part series premiered on 22 September 2022, with new episodes released weekly through 6 October 2022. Two additional episodes — bringing the total to five — were released on 20 March 2025, the first anniversary of the death of Markus Jooste, the former CEO widely alleged to be the central figure in the scheme.

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The Case: South Africa's Biggest Corporate Fraud

At its peak, Steinhoff International was a global retail giant, dual-listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and Germany's Xetra exchange, with brands spanning furniture, clothing, and consumer goods across Africa, Europe, and Australia. Behind that gleaming facade, according to investigators, lay a systematic and sophisticated financial fraud that had been running for years.

The alleged scheme involved fraudulent financial reporting, the use of offshore shell companies in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, inflated asset valuations, and deliberately concealed liabilities — all designed to mislead investors, auditors, and regulators about the true financial health of the company.

On 5 December 2017, Steinhoff disclosed what it euphemistically called accounting irregularities. The stock price collapsed overnight. Within days, an estimated R200 billion in shareholder value had been wiped from the JSE — pension funds, retirement accounts, and ordinary investors left holding worthless paper. The South African Hawks and the Reserve Bank launched investigations. An independent forensic audit by KPMG confirmed massive discrepancies in the company's books. Parliamentary hearings followed.

Markus Jooste: The Man at the Centre

Markus Jooste had been CEO of Steinhoff International since 2007. Known for his lavish lifestyle, obsession with horse racing, and the persona of a self-made billionaire, he resigned immediately upon the disclosure of the irregularities. Investigators alleged he was the architect of the fraud. The Reserve Bank imposed a R1.4 billion asset freeze on him, and the Hawks pursued a criminal case for years.

Yet Jooste was never charged. He was never convicted. He never stood trial. On 20 March 2024, he died by suicide in South Africa. Director Richard Finn Gregory has stated publicly that he believes the death was a genuine suicide rather than the subject of any conspiracy — though the series acknowledges that some aspects of the full story remain unresolved.

The Victims

The human cost of the Steinhoff scandal was not confined to institutional investors. Thousands of ordinary South Africans — retirees, pensioners, and workers whose retirement funds were invested in Steinhoff — saw their savings decimated. No single named individual victim is highlighted in the series; the focus is on the collective scale of loss, which makes the story both harder to personalise and, in many ways, more devastating.

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Production: IdeaCandy and the Making of Steinheist

IdeaCandy has established itself as South Africa's leading true crime production company, responsible for acclaimed series including Devilsdorp, Tracking Thabo Bester, and Rosemary's Hitlist. Steinheist represents the company's foray into corporate crime — a genre that demands a different kind of storytelling rigour than murder or cult investigations.

Director Richard Finn Gregory, a member of the Documentary Filmmakers Association and a multiple SAFTA winner, combined deep investigative journalism with dramatised reconstruction to make the complexity of financial fraud accessible to a broad audience. A key journalistic source was Rob Rose of the Financial Mail, whose reporting on Steinhoff was instrumental in bringing the scandal to public attention before and after the 2017 collapse.

The series was praised for its insider access, its willingness to sit with unresolved questions, and its dramatised sequences that brought the paper trail to life for viewers unfamiliar with corporate finance. The release of two new episodes in March 2025 — timed to coincide with the anniversary of Jooste's death — demonstrated a commitment to following the story wherever it leads, even after its central figure is no longer alive to face justice.

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Reception: Records, Awards, and Controversy

Steinheist smashed Showmax viewing records upon release, registering the most first-day views of any documentary series on the platform. Audience reaction on social media was immediate and enthusiastic, with viewers praising the series for making a complex financial story genuinely gripping.

At the SAFTA Awards 2022, Steinheist was the most-nominated documentary. Gregory and Oosthuizen also won the Sanlam Group Financial Journalist of the Year 2022 award — the first television journalists to take the prize in nearly a decade. The IMDb page for the series exists under ID tt22172248, though no public rating has been posted.

The series has not been without controversy. Jooste's suicide before prosecution has prompted ongoing debate about accountability — he was, at the time of his death, a man alleged to have orchestrated one of history's great financial crimes, yet was never formally charged. The series raises, without fully resolving, the question of whether the full extent of offshore fraud will ever be known.

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The Case Today

Two new episodes released on 20 March 2025 revisit the aftermath of Jooste's death and the still-incomplete picture of how the fraud was structured and sustained across multiple jurisdictions. Steinhoff International itself underwent extensive restructuring following the 2017 collapse, was delisted from the JSE, relocated its headquarters to Germany, and appointed a new CEO, Pierino Origgi, to manage the wreckage.

For the thousands of investors who lost money — and for the pensioners whose retirement savings evaporated — there has been no criminal conviction and no definitive accounting of who, beyond Jooste, may bear responsibility. Civil litigation and regulatory investigations have continued in multiple countries. The Steinheist documentary remains the most comprehensive public record of how it all happened — and of how a man who may never answer for it in a court of law died before justice could reach him.