The Pretoria Specialised Commercial Crimes Court has sentenced Andries Benjamin La Grange (50), the former Chief Financial Officer of Steinhoff, to 10 years' direct imprisonment, of which 5 years are suspended for 5 years on condition that he is not found guilty of fraud during the period of suspension and that he gives evidence for the State in any further criminal proceedings against directors, officers and employees of the Steinhoff group. This is after La Grange entered into a plea and sentence agreement in terms of section 105 A with the State for one count of fraud of over R367 million, emanating from the manipulation of financial statements and failure to report fraudulent activities. He was convicted as such.
Steinhoff was a multinational holding company that was listed in Germany and South Africa and was officially liquidated on 13 October 2023. Its holdings were in the retail sector primarily in furniture and household goods and included a 43,8% stake in the South African Pepkor group.
From November to December 2016, the then Chief Executive Officer, Markus Johannes Jooste, who is now deceased, and La Grange defrauded a Steinhoff subsidiary, Steinhoff At Work, the board of directors of Steinhoff Manufacturing and Steinhoff South Africa of an amount of over R367 million. On the instruction of Jooste, La Grange created documentation of transactions that supported the fraudulent transactions used to inflate and falsify the annual financial statements of the Steinhoff Group for the financial year 2016. After investigations by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) La Grange was fined R2 million for the role he played in the Steinhoff At Work transactions and barred from holding office in a public company for 10 years.
The National Prosecuting Authority and the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation welcomes the sentence. Securing a second conviction and sentence in the Steinhoff matter in just a week is a reflection that even though the wheels of justice turn slowly, impunity no longer prevails, and those accused of complex commercial crime now know that it is a matter of when the dreaded knock on their door comes. This shows the NPA's commitment in dealing with one of the biggest cases of corporate fraud in the history of South Africa. This case has been one of the most complex commercial crime cases that the DPCI and the NPA have had to deal with. At a point when a significant breakthrough was made to enrol the case earlier this year, the main accused, ex-CEO of Steinhoff Markus Jooste took his life on the eve of his arrest, thus escaping the hands of justice when it mattered the most."
