Must-watch trailer: Showmax to release new Steinheist episodes

Showmax has just dropped the first trailer for the second instalment of Steinheist, which goes even deeper into unpacking the biggest corporate scam in South African history. 

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. 

Steinhoff’s share price plunged by 90% in a week, wiping over R200 billion off the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) – and off ordinary South Africans’ pensions and investments. 

“Apparently Markus said to his wife, ‘Give this five years. By then, it’ll have blown over, and then we can move on with our lives,’” former Coronation Fund Managers CEO and co-founder Thys du Toit says in episode 4.

That didn’t happen. Instead, five years after Jooste’s resignation, the first three episodes of Steinheist were met by rave reviews, record views on Showmax for a documentary, and a renewed public outcry about why Jooste was still a free man. 

Now episodes 4 and 5 pick up the story a month after the documentary’s 2022 release, when the Reserve Bank seized R1.4bn of Jooste’s assets. From his 20-year ban and R15m fine from the JSE, to his pursuit by German authorities; from his record R475m fine from The Financial Sector Conduct Authority, to his police summons to stand trial, the new episodes trace how the net tightened around Jooste in the build-up to his suicide on a rocky beach in Hermanus on 21 March 2024.

Watch the trailer for Steinheist episodes 4 and 5

The story does not end with Jooste’s suicide. In fact, the very next day saw the arrest of former Steinhoff executive Stéhan Grobler. A month later, R60m of assets were seized from Bernice Odendaal, Jooste’s alleged mistress.  

Episodes 4 and 5 explore the ongoing attempts to recover the money and bring Jooste’s accomplices to justice, from insider trading prosecutions in South Africa to fraud convictions in Germany to the sentencing and plea deal of Ben la Grange, Steinhoff’s former chief financial officer.  

Comparing the case to a chess game, Jooste’s fellow Hermanus resident, Alec Hogg, editor of BizNews, says, “The game is not over. There are still other pieces on the board… That’s really the big question: ‘Who are the accomplices?’“

Christo Wiese, the former chair of Steinhoff, agrees. As he says of Jooste in the trailer, “We all accepted that he couldn’t do it alone.”

In addition to Wiese and Hogg, Steinheist’s second instalment features interviews with those closest to the story, including:

• Lesetja Kganyago, governor of the South African Reserve Bank
• Alex Pascoe, head of market abuse at the Financial Sector Conduct Authority
• Zwelakhe Mnguni, chief investment officer and co-founder at Benguela Global Fund Managers, who brought the first criminal case against Markus Jooste
• Louis du Preez, the CEO of Steinhoff when it was dissolved
• News24’s Jan Cronjé, runner-up in the Business Journalism category at the 2024 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards for his reporting on Steinhoff
• Former Daily Maverick investigative journalist Pauli Van Wyk, a previous Journalist of the Year winner
• Rob Rose, who literally wrote the book on Steinheist

Episode 5 ends with the question of how to avoid a corporate scam of this scale happening again. 

As Khaya Sithole, an accountant, academic and activist, says, “People should not be allowed to labour under the impression that it will never happen again - because we didn't see this one coming. That means we probably can't see the next one coming unless we do things differently.”

Steinheist is made by SAFTA-winning true crime pioneers IdeaCandy (Devilsdorp, Tracking Thabo Bester, Rosemary’s Hitlist, School Ties).

Steinheist went on to become the most-nominated documentary going into the SAFTAs, with director Richard Finn Gregory and producer Elle Oosthuizen winning the Sanlam Group Financial Journalist of the Year award for 2022 - the first TV journalists to take home the prize in nearly a decade. The duo also won the Broadcast: TV and Video category award.

“When the first part came out, there was a huge outcry about why nothing had been done, five years after so many people lost their retirement savings,” says Gregory, who happened to be in Hermanus on the day Jooste committed suicide. “It seems that releasing Steinheist added some pressure on the various authorities to make things happen with the case. So it was important to update the story to show that the wheels of justice have been turning, if not quite as quickly as many would have hoped.” 

Episodes 4 and 5 premiere on Showmax on Thursday, 20 March 2025 - the day before the one-year anniversary of Jooste’s suicide.

While you wait, rewatch the first three episodes on Showmax here.