Paula Vennells’ testimony at the Post Office inquiry is over

Former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has finished giving evidence to the Horizon IT inquiry after three days of intense questioning.

Ms Vennells broke down in tears multiple times and made a series of admissions about her tenure as chief executive from 2012 to 2019.

Over the past three days, she has tearfully admitted to making a false statement to MPs and said she “possibly” hoped that a mediation scheme with sub-postmasters would “minimise compensation”.

However, Ms Vennells has answered countless questions with “I don’t recall” and “I don’t remember”, despite her position as CEO of Post Office Limited for seven years.

The scandal, dubbed the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice, involved the prosecution by the Post Office of 900 sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015 because of the faulty Horizon system.

Here are the key takeaways from the last three days of questioning:

Vennells’ tearful claims dismissed by lawyers as ‘absolute rubbish’

Ms Vennells sobbed on multiple occasions during her first day of giving evidence, and once again on her final day.

On day one, she broke down as she apologised to all those affected by the scandal, and again as she apologised for telling MPs that “every prosecution involving the Horizon system had been successful and had found in favour of the Post Office”.

She cried for a third time while speaking of a sub-postmaster who died by suicide.

Ms Vennells gave a much more stoic performance during Thursday’s evidence – until the end of the day when she fought back tears while discussing why she stepped back in 2019 for family reasons.

She sobbed for a final time on Friday, saying she “loved the Post Office” and worked hard to “deliver the best Post Office for the UK”.

She said: “I’ve worked as hard as I could and to the best of my ability. I know today how much wasn’t told to me. I now know information that I didn’t get.

“And I don’t know, in some cases, why it didn’t reach me. But my only motivation was for the best for the Post Office. And for the hundreds of postmasters that I met.”

Sam Stein KC, a lawyer on behalf of a number of sub-postmasters at the Horizon IT inquiry, responded: “That’s absolute rubbish.”

Former Post Office boss living in a ‘cloud of denial’

Edward Henry KC, representing some sub-postmasters, has said to Ms Vennells that her witness statement is a “craven self-serving account” and that “to this day” she still lives in “a cloud of denial”.

During Friday’s evidence, she named five executives who she said were to blame for the Horizon IT scandal. This includes a missing IT expert and a former in-house lawyer who has refused to appear before the inquiry.

During the past three days, Ms Vennells has repeatedly claimed that her senior executives did not tell her information.

But Mr Henry accused Ms Vennells of living in “la-la land” over her lack of knowledge about what was going on.

It comes after the second day of evidence was characterised by Ms Vennells responding with “I don’t remember” or “I can’t recall” to questions put to her by Jason Beer KC, counsel for the inquiry.

She denied trying to close down a review into the Horizon software that led to wrongful convictions of sub-postmasters, and rejected that the Post Office’s executive team hid “dirty laundry” from the board.

Vennells ‘more bored than outraged’ by media report on sub-postmaster

It emerged on Friday that Ms Vennells had written that she was “more bored than outraged” by a BBC report about campaigning sub-postmasters.

In an email dated 2014, Ms Vennells wrote that the BBC Today programme report was “unhelpful and inaccurate” and said Horizon scandal victim Jo Hamilton “lacked passion and admitted false accounting on TV”.

She also wrote: “The MP quoted (who?) was full of bluster, and inaccurate.”

The email was shown to the inquiry and met with gasps and boos from the audience.

Ms Vennells said the email was a “terrible mistake” and said: “I regret everything I said.”

She continued: “The pressure we were under at the time to try to manage the, what we genuinely felt, was an imbalance of media coverage and representation about what was happening in the Post Office.”

She apologised directly to Ms Hamilton saying: “I’m deeply sorry that I was so rude to you in that email.”

But the former sub-postmistress said she doubts the sincerity of Ms Vennells’ apology to her. She said: “I accept anyone’s apology but whether she means it or not is another matter. I’m not sure.”

Omitting Horizon from Royal Mail report listed as one of Vennells’ ‘key achievements’

Throughout Ms Vennells’ testimony, she has been quizzed over whether she tried to “keep a lid” on the Horizon scandal – an accusation she has repeatedly denied.

On Thursday, she refuted claims she tried to “close down” or reduce the scope of the Second Sight review of Horizon.

The review was limited to assessing just a handful of cases in the last 12-18 months, to answer the question of whether there were systemic defects in Horizon that led to wrongful convictions.

Ms Vennells said she “could not remember” the logic behind that decision.

A report concluded there were no systemic defects with Horizon after reviewing just “two to three cases”.

On Friday, Ms Vennells was accused of “trying to keep a lid” on the Second Sight report in July 2013 – when the privatisation of Royal Mail was to be announced.

Mr Henry suggested that Royal Mail’s flotation may have led bosses to avoid reopening prosecutions of sub-postmasters.

Ms Vennells insisted she had no role in Royal Mail’s privatisation.

But later, Tim Moloney KC – representing victims of the scandal – produced an email where Ms Vennells emailed the Post Office chair saying she “earned her keep” by keeping the Post Office Horizon IT issues out of the Royal Mail’s privatisation prospectus in 2013.

It was listed as a “key achievement” in her yearly personal appraisal and review.

Vennells repeatedly denied making PR decisions

Ms Vennells has repeatedly denied that negative news coverage influenced her decision-making.

However, it emerged that she killed a review that would have exposed the scandal more than a decade ago after being warned it would make “front-page news”.

Ms Vennells asked executives in an email why there might not be a full historical review of around 500 cases of post office operators accused of false accounting.

Her communications lead, Mark Davies, warned that a review would “fuel the story” and could become “very high profile”.

She responded that she would “take your steer” and that the most urgent objective was to “manage the media”.

On Thursday, Ms Vennells admitted attempting to “manipulate language” when she sought to make Horizon bugs sound “non-emotive” – again, taking Mr Davies’ advice.

On Friday, lawyer Sam Stein accused the former Post Office CEO of wanting to “get rid” of the sub-postmasters like they were the “bugs in the system”.

Ms Vennells replied that she “did not set a culture like that” and that she felt “very uncomfortable that the Post Office was going through this”.