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- Berdine Odendaal is hoping the Reserve Bank will again release funds from one of her blocked accounts to pay for her monthly expenses.
- If she is successful, the bank will release R150 000 a month to cover costs such as the stabling and transportation of her polo ponies.
- Other monthly expenses include satellite TV, supplements, a garden worker and vet costs.
- For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.
If Markus Jooste's rumoured former romantic partner, Berdine Odendaal, is successful in her latest court bid, the SA Reserve Bank will again cover everything from stabling her polo ponies to her makeup, clothing and her domestic worker.
The keen polo player, who lives at the exclusive Val de Vie Estate outside Paarl in the Cape Winelands, wants the bank to again start releasing R150 000 a month to her from one of her blocked bank accounts.
Odendaal's accounts were blocked in early 2021 after she received a total of R60 million in loans from a company linked to late Steinhoff CEO Markus Jooste. The bank suspects that Jooste and Steinhoff flouted SA's strict exchange control provisions when they brought the funds into SA.
How was the R150 000 calculated? Odendaal's latest court documents, filed with the Supreme Court on Appeal (SCA) in February, do not say.
But her legal battle with the Reserve Bank has a long history. And among the hundreds of pages of correspondence between her lawyers and the bank is a document that sets out her monthly expenses.
Shortly after her accounts were blocked and assets frozen in early April 2021, Odendaal's lawyers – the same firm that represented Jooste – asked the bank to let her access funds to cover her fixed monthly expenses, living costs, and mounting legal fees.
Since the bank now controlled her purse strings, Odendaal had to set out exactly what she spent each month. She did this sometime in the first half of 2021. As the graphic below shows, her expenses came to around R170 000 a month.
Almost half was spent stabling, transporting, insuring and looking after her polo ponies.
After weeks of back and forth, the central bank agreed to release R150 000 a month from one of her blocked accounts for "all reasonable expenses" in July 2021.
Odendaal received the first payment in July 2021. She also received two ad hoc payments to help cover insurance costs and legal fees. But the agreement with the central bank only lasted a few months.
The bank put a stop to the monthly payments in March 2022, saying Odendaal "repudiated" the deal after she went to court to try to compel the bank to also cover her legal costs.
Odendaal, however, is adamant that the bank should also cover her legal costs, saying it had promised to do so in correspondence after her assets were frozen.
The bank has denied doing anything of the sort, saying that the R150 000 a month it agreed to release was for all her reasonable expenses, including legal fees.
Odendaal's bid to have the SCA reinstate the R150 000-a-month payment has not been heard. The appeals court will first have to decide whether it will grant her leave to appeal a lower court's ruling that found the SARB had lawfully cancelled its agreement with her.
