The Stellenbosch Billionaires' Club

Many of the characters in the Steinhoff group collapse drama lived within shouting distance of one another in the Boland.

- Brent Styan

On 5 December 2017 the Steinhoff group was still worth R193 billion and one of the top ten biggest companies on South Africa’s stock exchange.

It was the darling of investors and the name was emblazoned on the shirts of the national Springbok Sevens rugby team. Twenty-four hours later more than R117 billion of this fortune was wiped out. The total value of the loss (including associated companies which were affected) has since been estimated at more than R300 billion. The Steinhoff Empire, which took 50 years to build into an international business giant, had crashed overnight.

At the centre of the disaster is Markus Jooste, Steinhoff’s flashy CEO, known – amongst others – for owning the second largest string of racehorses in the world, after the Sheik of Dubai.

Jooste resigned as the crisis hit and has since been dodging an avalanche of scandals and accusations. What exactly happened here and who knew what is still being puzzled out, but one question has been: Does this all have something to do with the so-called “Stellenbosch mafia” and in fact, who is the “Stellenbosch mafia”?