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It’s not like Christo Wiese is going to be filing for bankruptcy any time soon, but it must have been pretty galling to watch a scandal like Steinhoff wipe billions off your net worth.

The retail tycoon lost more than $2 billion (R23 billion) thanks to that scandal, and then there’s the falling out with Markus Jooste.

Wiese took Jooste under his wing back in the day, but as the Steinhoff wheels came off when Jooste stuck a R200 million knife in Wiese’s back.

That would have stung, but there’s a little light at the end of the tunnel. Over to Business Day:

Shoprite, which announced higher profit this week, advanced about 40% in the past year, softening Wiese’s financial blow from the Steinhoff collapse and providing him with an easy-to-sell asset when he needed cash. The $1.9bn stake now makes up the majority of his depleted $2.5bn fortune…

Africa’s largest grocer gave an upbeat outlook and raised the dividend. The shares jumped as much as 6.4% on Tuesday. The performance provided Wiese with a diversion from the questions swirling around Steinhoff, which still hasn’t explained the nature of the potential wrongdoing it disclosed in early December or how deep it goes.

Shoprite is “a particular ray of light”, Wiese, who chairs its board of directors, said in an interview on the sidelines of the retailer’s results presentation on Tuesday. “It’s been a long and happy association.”

You can bet that his plummeting fortune would have hurt his ego, given that he was widely admired for his seemingly golden touch.

At various points this year, he has reacted angrily to questions about the Steinhoff scandal:

Wiese appeared frustrated in January when MPs in Cape Town asked him how he and the board had missed the alleged fraud. He pointed the finger at management and the “handsomely” paid accountants who failed to spot problems until late 2017, an argument he reiterated in an interview with Bloomberg.

“In any large business, a board has to rely on its executives and on the structures that are in place,” Wiese said on February 12. “I just don’t know how you run a business otherwise. I mean, it is a hugely complex company.”

I suppose he has a point there.

Hopefully, once the investigation into Steinhoff is complete, we will know exactly where to point the blame.

[source:busday]