Markus Jooste’s family trust Silver Oak only has assets worth around R100 million and not billions of rands as suggested in the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) attachment order for the assets of the alleged mastermind of the massive corporate fraud at Steinhoff, according to a Silver Oak Trust trustee.
This was according to Gary Harlow, a trustee and one of the respondents in the attachment order that SARB obtained from the Cape High Court, and acted upon on Tuesday when its officials appeared at Jooste’s Hermanus home. Harlow, a director that has sat on many boards in South Africa, and somebody who knew Jooste for 30 years, was interviewed yesterday by Biznews.com
According to the attachment order disclosed on the SARB website, Jooste’s assets to be attached include those of the Trust, art worth about R98.78m, financial assets worth R1.21 billion, loans receivable of R131.12m, Jooste’s house in Voelklip, Hermanus, at least six luxury vehicles, jewellery and other art worth some R795 400, books, documents, electronic devices and passwords, and the Lanzerac wine estate in Stellenbosch.
Harlow said in the Biznews interview he had not been aware of the SARB raids at Jooste’s home in Hermanus on Tuesday afternoon, he had learnt about it in an SMS on Tuesday evening, and he had also not been made aware he would be listed as a respondent in the SARB order. SARB executed the order for alleged foreign exchange control contraventions.
Harlow said in the interview Jooste had approached him and Rian du Plessis four years ago, two weeks after Steinhof collapsed, to be trustees, with the aim of looking after Jooste’s family in the event something should happen to Jooste. Du Plessis and Jooste’s son Michael are the other two trustees, and were also listed in the attachment order.
Harlow said “The farm in Stellenbosch has been sold” and art worth about R25m had been sold in the four years, so that Jooste and his family “had money to live on.”
Harlow said he accepted the request to be a trustee because when somebody came to him and asked for help, “he (Jooste) just looked terrible”, it was something that he tried to do.
He said the authorities were under enormous pressure to deal with these events. “I have to be cognisant of my own financial fiduciary duties. I sit on boards of public companies, I didn’t even earn ‘a cent’ in trustee fees. I was asked to look after someone's family.”
Harlow said the trust did not trade in the past four years and had no link to Steinhof. He said the loan account was worth zero, as the money owed to it was from Mayfair, Jooste’s horse-racing company that had long gone bankrupt.
He said there were two “two or three investment houses, but small” in the trust, “some art” that was “nowhere near” the value cited in the SARB order, and the house in Hermanus. “Whatever the Reserve Bank wants from us we will give,” said Harlow.
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