Berdin Odendaal and Markus Jooste.
- Berdin Odendaal hopes the Reserve Bank will again release funds from one of her blocked accounts to pay her monthly expenses.
- If she is successful, the bank will release R150,000 a month to cover costs such as stabling and transporting her polo pony.
- Other monthly expenses include satellite TV, supplements, gardener fees, veterinarian fees, etc.
- For more financial news, visit: News24 Business Top Page.
If Berdine Odendaal, rumored to be Markus Jooste's ex-girlfriend, wins her latest court case, the South African Reserve Bank will again cover everything from her polo pony stable to her make-up, clothes and domestic workers. It turns out.
The avid polo player, who lives in the exclusive Val de Vie estate on the outskirts of Paarl in the Cape Winelands, has decided that her bank will start paying back R150,000 a month again from one of her blocked bank accounts. I want it.
Ms Odendaal's accounts were frozen in early 2021 after she received loans totaling R60 million from companies linked to Steinhoff's late chief executive Markus Jooste. The bank suspects that Jooste and Steinhoff ignored SA's strict exchange control rules when they brought the money into SA.
How was the R150,000 calculated? There is no mention of it in Mr Odendaal's latest court papers, filed with the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in February.
But her legal battles with the Reserve Bank have a long history. And among the hundreds of pages of correspondence between her lawyer and the bank were documents detailing her monthly expenses.
Immediately after her accounts were blocked and assets froze in early April 2021, Ms. Odendaal's lawyers (the same firm that represented Jooste) were forced to pay for fixed monthly expenses, living expenses, and a growing attorney. It asked banks to allow it access to funds to cover costs.
Now that the bank is in control of her purse strings, Ms. Odendaal has had to accurately report her monthly expenses. She did this sometime in the first half of 2021. As the diagram below shows, her expenses came to about R170,000 per month.
Almost half was spent on stabling, transporting, insuring and caring for the polo ponies.
After weeks of back and forth, the central bank agreed to release R150,000 a month from one of her blocked accounts in July 2021 for “all reasonable expenses”.
Image: Charlene Rood/News24
Image: Charlene Rood/News24
Odendaal received her first payment in July 2021. He also received two extraordinary payments to cover insurance costs and legal costs. However, the agreement with the central bank lasted only a few months.
The bank stopped monthly payments in March 2022 and said it “rejected” the deal after Ms Odendaal went to court to try to force the bank to also cover her legal costs.
But Ms Odendaal was adamant that the bank should also cover her legal costs and said it had promised to do so in a letter after her assets were frozen.
Banks denied any such action and said the R150,000 per month she agreed to release covered all of her reasonable expenses, including legal fees.
Mr Odendaal's proposal to reinstate the R150,000 monthly payments to the SCA has fallen on deaf ears. The Court of Appeal must first decide whether to grant her leave to appeal the lower court's decision that found the SARB had legally terminated her contract.
