Paula Vennells live: Ex-post office boss accused of ‘crocodile tears’ during investigation

Postal union CWU posted a video of Vennells’ tearful testimony accusing her of producing “crocodile tears”.

They added: “No tears as postal workers tragically committed suicide due to stress. No tears when postal workers were imprisoned. “No tears when the entire community of postmasters turned against them. Tears are too late now. Paula Vennells must be held accountable.”

Sir Wyn Williams asks just before the break about the Post Office’s strategy and whether Vennells was advised to be “very careful, very circumspect and very cautious” about what you said to MPs.

She replies, “I would [agree] but I’m not sure I would have noticed that on the morning of the day.

She takes about five seconds to start her answer: “In retrospect, because possibly…

He interjects, “If you need time to think about it, you can tell me in the morning” to laughter from the gallery.

It looks like she’s starting to tear up again.

Jason Beer KC says the investigation will take place shortly before tonight.

He shows Paula an email from General Counsel Jane MacLeod, telling her to be prepared for “negative comments from the usual commentators.”

She replies: “Thanks Jane. This is clear – my intimate [sic] question is we FJ [Fujitsu] superusers. What did we say before?”

Ms MacLeod writes back: “We haven’t really addressed super users and the wording of some previous statements about who can access and edit branch data is quite limited.”

She added: “It is clear that this is an area where we may experience negative commentary in the media.”

A former subpostmistress told the story The independent the post office accused her children of stealing money from the till.

Myra Philip worked at the counter with her mother, Mary, who ran a post office in Auchtermuchty, a town in Fife, Scotland.

She and her mother paid back £70,000 to the Post Office through a combination of loans, savings and borrowing from relatives, leaving her feeling ‘humiliated, ashamed and frustrated’.

The inquiry was told via an email sent by Paula Vennells before the select committee hearing, in which she said she had to tell MPs that “it is not possible” to access Horizon remotely. Counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, asked why she had to say that remote access was not possible.

Ms Vennells replied: “I made this point very specifically and I can remember why I did this.

‘Alice Perkins, doesn’t have anything to do with this specifically, but I remember Alice Perkins saying to me at one point, ‘Paula, if you want to get the truth and a very clear answer from someone, you have to tell him or her tell me what you want.’ say it very clearly and then ask for the information that supports it’, which is why I formulated it that way.”

Mr Beer said: “That’s a strange way of going about it, isn’t it? ‘I want to know the answer to the question, here’s the answer to the question, tell me I’m wrong’.”

Ms Vennells added: “Well, I hoped they would… I believed that was absolutely the case, I had a duty to appear before the select committee to be able to share the information I knew and answer their questions correctly to be able to answer. and this is what I tried to ask from the team. I have in no way, if you are suggesting this, tried to tell them what the answer should be.

Paula Vennells said she “didn’t understand” how much access Fujistu had to the Horizon IT system.

Ms Vennells was shown details of a 2011 statement which referred to an audit of the system by accountancy firm Ernst & Young.

The statement said that Ernst & Young had discovered that “inappropriate system permissions” had been assigned at the database level, increasing the risk of “erroneous transactions.”

“I don’t think I accepted it…that I understood the level of detail.”

Paula Vennells accepted that she routinely received correspondence about problems faced by sub-postmasters.

When asked if she saw a pattern in the correspondence, she said: “I saw the Horizon theme coming.”

“Did you do anything to connect the dots between them?” counsel to the inquiry asked Jason Beer KC.

Ms Vennells replied: “The points I thought were brought together by the investigative work in the Complaints Mediation Programme, and in any case I believed we had looked at them in some detail and I regret today that neither has clearly exposed the issues that we encountered. which you can find out more about through the Horizon Issues ruling.”

Paula Vennells said she did not believe lawyers’ statements about Horizon were “folklore”.

Jason Beer KC asked her whether it said something about the culture of the organization that false statements were allowed to be spread about the IT system.

Ms Vennells took a long pause before responding, saying she had no reason to believe the statements were false.

A former subpostmaster who tried to warn the organization about the Horizon system sent Paula Vennells an email in 2016 saying, “I wonder what kind of god you worship.”

Paula Vennells was questioned about a number of emails she received from Tim McCormack during the Horizon IT Inquiry.

The inquiry heard how the sub-postmaster received a canned response to one of his emails, with the post office’s lawyer, Rodric Williams, commenting before the response was sent:

“In general, I believe that this man is a bluff who always expects us to do his bidding. I don’t think we should do that, but instead respond with an outright bludgeon.”

Ms Vennells denied she thought Mr McCormack was a bluster.

Mr McCormack sent another email to Ms Vennells in July 2016, saying: “A typical head-in-the-sand response from the team you have placed too much trust in. Once the police investigation is completed, it is highly likely, and even probable, that members of your staff will be sent to prison. Your role in this will not escape attention.”

He added: “I wonder what kind of god you worship.”

The Post Office’s legal team was responsible for false statements and ‘folklore’ about the IT Horizon accounting system circulating within the organisation, Paula Vennells has suggested.

She was asked why the staff had made comments claiming that Horizon had no errors; every time the software was examined there were no errors; the Post Office always won in court and that Fujitsu had no remote access to the system.

Ms Vennells said these statements were not false at the time before suggesting the Post Office’s legal team was responsible for them.

“The source of these statements was… the only possible source of this statement would have been through the Post Office legal team.”