Steinhoff's accounting scandal

Steinhoff International had grown over three decades from a small South African furniture importer into a sprawling global retail conglomerate, controlling household-name chains across Europe, the US, Australia and Africa, largely through an aggressive string of debt-fueled acquisitions. On December 6, 2017, the company disclosed that its auditors had uncovered accounting irregularities serious enough to delay its annual results, and chief executive Markus Jooste resigned the same day; the stock lost more than 90% of its value within roughly a week as the scale of the problem became clear. Subsequent investigations found that Steinhoff had for years used a network of off-balance-sheet entities to inflate revenue and profit and disguise the true state of its finances, in a fraud investigators later estimated at several billion dollars. The collapse wiped out an estimated $12 billion or more in shareholder value, including heavy losses for South African pension funds that had held the stock, and Steinhoff spent years afterward in a slow, court-supervised debt restructuring to keep its operating businesses alive.