Analysis
Tearful testimony confirms for many how much Post
Office’s Vennells knew
Daniel
Boffey
Chief
reporter
There were times during Horizon inquiry when victims
of scandal struggled to keep composure as former chief executive pleaded
ignorance
Fri 24 May
2024 12.16 EDT
It was
difficult for the victims attending the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal
on the fifth floor of Aldwych House in central London to demur from the
conclusion of Moya Greene, a former chief executive of Royal Mail and Paula
Vennells’ boss until the Post Office split off in 2012.
“I think
you knew,” Greene had written to Vennells in January, according to a text
message published by the inquiry this week.
Three days
of what at times was tearful testimony from Vennells, who joined the Post
Office in 2007 and served as its chief executive from 2012 to 2019, have
confirmed to many how much she had always known about the problems with the
organisation’s Horizon IT system, whose false branch balances led to a decade
of prosecutions, bankruptcies and suicides as people were hounded over apparent
shortfalls in funds.
The lead
counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer, carefully led the inquiry through documents
that showed that in 2011 Vennells had read a report from auditors Ernst and
Young, which included references to it being problematic that Fujitsu, the
creators of the Horizon system, had remote access to the records.
The tricky
question over many years for the Post Office was how it could trust a system
that was open to such tampering from afar and, as late as 2015, Vennells had
been telling a Commons select committee that such remote access was not
possible, while her right-hand woman was saying as much in court in 2019.
In order to
explain away the telling documents flashing up in black and white on the
monitors around the inquiry room, Vennells claimed neither to have fully
understood the report she read in 2011, nor a similar disclosure that passed
her desk in 2014.
The inquiry
then moved on to hear Vennells confirm that she knew by mid-2013 about at least
three bugs in the Horizon system.
She had
spent a number of years denying their existence, but by that summer she was
being assured by staff that the first two of those bugs were historical and
that a third had not led to any branch shortfalls.
Vennells
did momentarily wonder whether a full review of the 500 cases of false
accounting might be undertaken in light of such knowledge, emails showed. She
was quickly dissuaded.
“If we say
publicly that we will look at past cases … whether from recent history or going
further back, we will open this up very significantly into front-page news,”
wrote her director of communications, Mark Davies. “In media terms, it becomes
mainstream, very high profile.”
“You are
right to call this out,” Vennells responded. “And I will take your steer, no
issue.” She went on to write that the most urgent objective was to “manage the
media”.
Vennells
had further been aware by that summer that Gareth Jenkins, the Fujitsu expert
witness whose testimony about the integrity of the Horizon system had been key
to prosecutions, was now regarded by the in-house legal team as an “unsafe
witness”. He had not disclosed to the courts his knowledge of bugs in the
system.
On oath to
the inquiry, Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s general counsel, claimed she had
informed Vennells on the eve of a boardroom meeting that July that she believed
that as a result there would be “many successful claims arising from past
wrongful prosecutions”.
It was
again a difficult moment for Vennells but, again, she emphasised her lack of
legal and IT knowledge. The significance of the problem with Jenkins’ evidence
was lost on her, she suggested. She denied outright any such conversation with
Crichton.
There were
times over the three days of Vennells’ evidence when those whose lives had been
blighted by an organisation that had treated them with contempt struggled to
keep their composure as she rolled out her claims of ignorance.
At the end
of the third day came perhaps the loudest reaction: a collective sigh of
despair.
The inquiry
heard of an email written by Vennells about an item on the Post Office scandal
on the BBC’s One Show in 2014.
“Hype and
human interest,” Vennells wrote. “Not easy for me to be objective, but I was
more bored than outraged. The MP quoted – who? – was full of bluster and
inaccurate. Jo Hamilton lacked passion and admitted false accounting on TV.”
Hamilton,
66, who was played by Monica Dolan in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post
Office, was wrongly accused of stealing more than £36,000 from her Post Office
branch in South Warnborough, Hampshire. To avoid a jail sentence, she had
pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting, and was prosecuted in
2006.
She was a
few feet from Vennells on Friday as Tim Moloney KC, a barrister representing
the victims, read out the content of the damning email. Vennells turned her
gaze from the barristers to Hamilton to apologise: “Of course what I would like
to say is, ‘I’m very, very sorry … I regret everything I wrote.’”
“I don’t
think it was sincere,” Hamilton later reflected. “She got caught with her pants
down.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário