Steinhoff executive signed a deal to avoid a fine in South Africa but was sent to jail in Germany

The former finance chief of Steinhoff’s Europe division, Dirk Schreiber, walked away with no penalty from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in South Africa.

This was due to a leniency agreement Schreiber entered into in exchange for his full cooperation. 

However, Schreiber faced a harsh penalty in Germany, where he was sentenced to a three-and-a-half-year prison stint. This made Schreiber the first person to be imprisoned in connection with the Steinhoff accounting scandal.

The FSCA detailed its investigation into the Steinhoff scandal in its Regulatory Actions report released on Friday, 31 July.

The financial sector watchdog previously reported that its investigation into Steinhoff resulted in enforcement actions for insider trading and false financial reporting.

The FSCA’s investigation started after the sudden collapse of Steinhoff’s share price in December 2017.

The regulator looked into contraventions of the Financial Markets Act (FMA), which prohibits the publication of false, misleading, or deceptive statements regarding a listed entity’s performance.

The FSCA found that Steinhoff executives entered into deceptive transactions with independent third-party entities that were in fact closely related to company insiders.

It also found that Steinhoff’s financial statements and annual reports for the 2014 to 2016 financial years and the 2017 half-year significantly misstated and omitted key facts.

These misstatements inflated Steinhoff’s profits and asset values. At the time, Steinhoff was listed on the JSE and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Steinhoff’s status as a listed entity meant that its financial misstatements misled the market.

Once these findings were made, the FSCA imposed a record-breaking R1.5 billion administrative penalty on Steinhoff in 2019.

However, to avoid punishing shareholders who had already suffered huge losses, this penalty was reduced to R53 million.

This is not where the FSCA’s investigation ended. The regulator went a step further by imposing penalties on individual Steinhoff executives implicated in the scandal.

R857 million worth of penalties

Since the start of its investigation, the FSCA has imposed R910 million worth of administrative penalties on individuals implicated in the Steinhoff scandal.

The largest fine was imposed on the late Markus Jooste, the former Steinhoff CEO, who was the mastermind behind the company’s scheme.

The FSCA fined Jooste R20 million for insider trading and R475 million for publishing false financial statements.

Dr Gerhardus Diedricks Burger, a former Steinhoff company physician, was fined R3 million for insider trading.

More recently, in February 2026, the FSCA fined former Steinhoff company secretary Stehan Grobler R358.75 million for his role in the publication of false financial statements.

Grobler has since lodged an application for reconsideration of the penalty decision with the Financial Services Tribunal, and the matter is pending.

The FSCA said its broader market abuse investigation into the publication of false statements by Steinhoff is ongoing.

However, one executive who has not, and likely will never, face a penalty from the FSCA is Schreiber, a German national who worked at Steinhoff for 17 years.

When the scandal broke, Schreiber was serving as the chief financial officer of Steinhoff Europe.

When the FSCA launched its investigation, it found that Schreiber contravened the FMA by publishing false, misleading, or deceptive statements in Steinhoff’s financial reports.

However, despite this contravention, the FSCA did not impose an administrative penalty on Schreiber.

In a press statement released in March 2024, the FSCA noted “the extent of Mr Schreiber’s co-operation with the investigation”.

Given his cooperation and section 156 (3) of the FSR Act, “the FSCA was satisfied that it appropriately entered into a leniency agreement with Mr Schreiber”.

The leniency agreement, which the FSCA published, stated that Schreiber voluntarily agreed to assist the regulator without any financial compensation.

In return for leniency, he was required to provide full, truthful information and self-incriminating evidence regarding potential FMA contraventions.

He also had to maintain strict confidentiality and refrain from misusing any information obtained during the investigation.

Schreiber’s cooperation proved useful to the FSCA’s investigation, allowing the watchdog to make findings against Jooste, Burger, and Grobler.

While he did not face penalties in South Africa, Schreiber became the first top Steinhoff manager to be sentenced to jail for the fraud scheme.

In August 2023, Schreiber was handed a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence by the Oldenburg Court in Germany. 

Since the probe into his wrongdoing took too long, he won a reduction of one year and only had to serve two and a half years.