If you’re a South African based company right now, you really don’t want to be associated with the mess over at Steinhoff.

Those wheels have well and truly come off, and yesterday’s story on Markus Jooste stabbing Christo Wiese in the back shows just how desperate the situation has become.

Now, off the back of rumours that Viceroy Research was targeting a South African property company, property stock prices across the JSE took a downward dip.

Viceroy Research would be the company behind the explosive exposé on Steinhoff back in December, which heaped further pressure on the company following Jooste’s resignation amidst the dodgy accounting scandal.

According to EasyEquities trading specialist Bryan Stewart, who spoke to Fin24, those rumours were enough to set off alarm bells:

Stewart said the Viceroy rumours have made investors “nervous” and the sell-off has impacted the profits of the property companies, which have been performing well.

The SA Listed Property index fell by over 7% in early trade, before recovering to trade 1% down at 11:30.

The PropTrax Ten, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the top 10 JSE-listed property groups, was down about 2% at 11:30…

Stewart emphasised that the Viceroy investigation into an SA property group was “just rumours” at the moment.

Pharmaceutical group Aspen, which also experienced a sell-off earlier this week on Viceroy rumours, has since recovered 7.8% of its share value after clarifying that it had had no contact with the US-based group.

Aspen panic sets in.

Safe to say that folks are pretty wary of Viceroy at this moment in time. They confirmed that they are looking at South African companies, as well as some European and American names, but wouldn’t divulge further details prior to the report’s release.

Let’s hope our big name businesses have their books in order.

[source:fin24]