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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.”
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