Director Richard Gregory on how he nearly turned down Steinheist

Showmax is now streaming the second instalment of Steinheist, which goes even deeper into unpacking the biggest corporate scam in South African history and how the net tightened around former Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste in the build-up to his suicide on 21 March 2024.

The first three episodes saw director Richard Finn Gregory and producer Elle Oosthuizen win the Sanlam Group Financial Journalist of the Year award for 2022 – the first TV journalists to win the prize in nearly a decade. 

The two new episodes have been just as critically acclaimed as the first three, with leading Afrikaans critic Leon van Nierop hailing them as “briljant”. 

Watch the trailer for Steinheist

Since Steinheist, Richard has kept collaborating with IdeaCandy on other hit documentaries, directing School Ties and Outside Lane, and consulting on both Rosemary’s Hitlist and The Station Strangler.

We caught up with the multi-award-winning director to find out more.

With Steinheist, what attracted you to the story right in the beginning?

IdeaCandy approached me to pitch on the story originally. Wim Steyn, their exec producer, had watched The Boers at the End of the World. He said this film had stuck in his mind, so he’d always wanted to explore working together. 

I was surprised when I saw the brief because I thought, ‘This is financial crime. I’m not a finance person at all. And it’s a docuseries, which is a format I haven’t worked in before.’ So my gut reaction was, ‘No, I don’t think this is for me.’

But when I did some more thinking I realised I was really interested in the personalities behind it. The sums of money were huge. When you read the news reports, that’s the kind of thing that you see the most. But what I wasn’t reading enough about was who the people were behind it, and what their motivations were. How did they go about perpetrating these crimes?’ 

That became my pitch. I said, ‘Well, look, I would want to tell this from a very human perspective, and try to get under the characters’ skins as much as I can. And I’ll try to find clever metaphors and ways of explaining complex concepts in a way that a dummy like me could understand.’ 

It turns out that they loved that approach. So we started working together, and that was the beginning of what’s now become a long and fruitful relationship.

On 6 December 2017, Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste resigned amid an investigation into accounting irregularities at the retail giant, which owned the likes of Ackermans, Incredible Connection, Morkels, Pennypinchers, PEP, Russells, Tekkie Town and Timbercity. In the simplest possible terms, can you explain what ‘accounting irregularities’ means in the context of Steinhoff?

Markus and some of his accomplices created fraudulent transactions. Sometimes it was literally writing numbers on a piece of paper and processing it as an invoice. These fraudulent transactions meant that it appeared there was a lot more money flowing around the Steinhoff companies than there really was. That made investors think that the company was doing well, so everyone wanted to buy Steinhoff shares. This meant the share price went up and the company was then worth a lot more money. This enabled Steinhoff to use its own shares to swap for other companies’ shares, using those shares as payment, almost as currency, to buy other companies. That’s how the Steinhoff Group of companies got bigger and bigger. The value of the company kept increasing as it made more acquisitions. So you had this growing bubble of value, which was all built on a house of cards. It was all built on fraudulent transactions. When that came out, the share price bubble burst almost immediately and lost something like 90% of its value, almost overnight. There was about R135 billion worth of fraudulent transactions that the PWC report uncovered. When the share price dropped, the loss in value of the company was over R200 billion.

What surprised you in making the first three episodes? 

How many people wanted to tell their story, and how high profile many of them were. Unfortunately, some of those conversations were strictly off the record, but even then they really wanted to point us in the right direction, and make sure we got it right. That also showed me that this wasn’t just about money; there was an emotional aspect to this. People’s pride was hurt. People’s trust was betrayed. 

How did the Steinhoff story shift people’s thinking about South Africa? 

Up till that point, we had thought of corruption in this country as being linked to the government and the public sector: things like Nkandla, the Guptas, and state capture. So when Steinhoff blew open, it made us rethink corruption in South Africa, that this was also in the corporate sector. 

The downside is that I think it’s made us even more wary and sceptical as South Africans. And that can manifest in conspiracy theories. We saw that with Markus Jooste’s suicide. Almost across the board, people’s initial reaction was, very often, ‘I don’t believe it. Show me the body or I don’t believe it’s really happened. He’s just pulled a Thabo Bester.’ 

You were in Hermanus on the day Jooste committed suicide. Why were you there? 

I happened to have a couple of days off after finishing another series for MultiChoice. I was pretty exhausted. That Thursday was Human Rights Day, so I was going to take the Friday off and was looking forward to a long weekend in a cute seaside town we hadn’t been to in a while. 

How did you hear the news?

We were just settling into a braai when I got a text message saying he’d committed suicide. This was before it was in the news but it was from a credible source. So I apologised to my wife and I jumped in the car, because I knew where his house was. The first reports that came out were that he had committed suicide in his house, as the police were trying to storm the door. But when I arrived there, there was nothing to see. There weren’t any police. The gates were all closed up. It was all eerily quiet, actually. I spoke to some of his neighbours and they said they hadn’t heard anything, and they hadn’t heard any gunshots. They all knew what had happened though. News spread quickly in the town. It was only a few hours later that we worked out that it was actually at the beach, about two kilometres from his house. I only figured out where the spot was the next morning and went down to the beach then. It was still a pretty gory scene.

What was your initial reaction on hearing the news?

I was shocked. I didn’t know how to take it. 

This was the richest cast in Showmax history, with access to the best lawyers. How nervous were you about getting sued?

I thought there was a decent chance that somebody was going to try to sue us. I was surprised when it didn’t happen, to be honest. That being said, Steinheist went through two rounds of legal checks with two different sets of lawyers to vet everything. And they erred on the side of being conservative. So I knew that what we were saying was relatively watertight and even if we had been sued, we were pretty confident nothing would succeed. 

Did the lawyers make you leave anything out that you really wanted to include? 

Only speculation. And you know, that’s fair enough. So yeah, there were some small editorial changes that had to happen from the lawyers’ perspective, but nothing substantial.

When did you start filming episodes 4 and 5? 

The first instalment came out in September 2022 and we’d started working on the next episodes by midway through 2023. 

Why should people come back and watch the new episodes? What’s new that wasn’t covered in the first three?

One of the things I wanted to show in these new episodes is a glimpse of how the authorities work. When the first episodes were released, people would say, ‘It’s been five years since the scandal and there’s been no action taken.’ So we try to show in these episodes what was happening out of the public eye. For example, we speak to Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank, and Alex Pascoe, head of market abuse at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, and we try to lift the lid on what was really happening behind the scenes, like the court orders that were being issued in secret. Hopefully that just gives us a little sense of confidence that when there’s a major crime like this, the authorities are working on it, even if they can’t reveal their hand to the public just yet. 

At what stage did you feel that you had an ending and were ready to release the new episodes?

When the highest execs at Steinhoff started seeing the inside of jail cells. That’s what people had been crying out for ever since the scandal happened. 

At the end of the first instalment, audiences were left with a lot of outrage and anger. When they watch the new episodes, how do you think they’ll feel? 

I’d like audiences to feel relief at understanding better what went on. At the end of the first three episodes, we were pretty convinced Markus Jooste did it – but we were left with the question of who else was involved. We manage to answer that question in these episodes. We’ve now got a clear idea of exactly what the scams were and who was involved. 

There’s also hopefully some satisfaction at seeing the wheels of justice turning and maybe some optimism that justice can happen in South Africa. We had a rough time during the state capture years, when South Africans started to lose faith that our country could actually prosecute crimes, could actually make a dent against corruption. 

I think Steinhoff has shown us that when we hang in there, the wheels of justice do turn, even if a lot more slowly than we’d like. Our public institutions do have teeth that are able to prosecute, eventually. 

Do you feel, personally, like justice has now been served? 

I think the question of whether justice has been served is going to depend on your perspective. If you’re an investor in Steinhoff, you probably don’t feel much sense of justice because you’ve lost a lot of money, and you’re never going to get that back, unfortunately. If you’re an outsider looking in, then yes, there’s some justice.

But there’s also a sense that justice works differently depending on how much money you’ve got. I think that’s another reality of the South African situation. It’s something we picked up on in the first few episodes. People see the inside of a jail cell very quickly if they’ve stolen a few thousand rand from their employer. But steal a few billion, and you can live a very nice life for quite a long time.

Having wrapped up five episodes, do you have any lingering questions?

There’s always going to be a question mark over what exactly was going through Markus Jooste’s mind to cause him to commit suicide. To our knowledge, he never left a suicide note. He never told anybody that this was on his mind. His lawyer thought he was going to jump on a plane with him that evening and go up to Pretoria to hand himself in the next day. So it did come as a surprise. In retrospect, we can see all the pressures that were on him and we speak to psychiatrists to understand the possible reasons, but it’s still really conjecture based on the evidence we have. 

What would you like to happen next? 

This case just needs to continue on the trajectory that it is on. There’s some high profile people who are in jail who have turned state witness. They are helping prosecutors with all the evidence they need to prosecute more people. 

Convictions are going to have a couple of effects. One is just some sense of justice that people can’t get away with crimes of this scale. The other is that it helps the international community see that South Africa is able to prosecute crimes – which will hopefully get us off the investment grey list and lead to more business confidence in our country. 

Is there a third instalment still to come? 

We never say never, but I don’t have plans for more episodes at this point because we’re seeing people inside jails, and we’ve hopefully done a good job of explaining how they got there and why they got there. From here on out, I think we can just continue watching the news and seeing who the next high-profile arrest is going to be, because I’m pretty sure there will be more.

In addition to Steinheist, you also directed School Ties for IdeaCandy and consulted on the serial killer documentaries Rosemary’s Hitlist and The Station Strangler. How has staring into the abyss on projects like this impacted you personally?

Especially when there are deaths and suicides involved, doing this kind of work does take a mental toll. There’s a difficult line to walk sometimes between trying to not let it affect us too much, and make sure we don’t get numb to it. The day that I’m unaffected by this stuff is the day I get worse at doing my job. But it’s also important to find some healthy self-care mechanisms. Sometimes that means therapy; sometimes it means switching off and spending uninterrupted time with my family; sometimes it’s staying active and sports like boxing that don’t allow anything else in my head for that period of time. 

Has making those kinds of films made you more jaded and sceptical? 

No, I don’t think sceptical is the right word. If anything, I am more optimistic about the ability for justice to be done. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with investigators, police, and various bodies and I’ve seen first-hand that there are some really great people, who care deeply about their jobs and are passionate about making sure justice is done. That has helped restore some of my faith. 

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