It is a case that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak himself considers “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in history” in the United Kingdom. The former boss of the British post office, interviewed on Wednesday on the scandal of postal workers wrongly prosecuted for theft, assured that she was unaware of the extent of the problems at the origin of the scandal. “I would just like to say (…) how sorry I am for all the postal workers and their families, and those who have suffered,” said Paula Vennells, in a short statement at the start of her highly anticipated testimony before the commission. ‘investigation.
Between 1999 and 2015, nearly a thousand branch managers of the Post Office, a public company, were prosecuted, accused of theft, on the basis of erroneous information from accounting software called Horizon, from Fujitsu. Postal workers had to repay falsely created accounting shortfalls, leading to their ruin for many. Some were imprisoned. Several dozen convictions have already been overturned by the courts but a bill is currently being examined in Parliament to exonerate and generally compensate the victims. in order to right what Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described as “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in history” in the UK.
A series broadcast at the beginning of January on the ITV television channel, and centered on the legal battle of one of the postal workers, Alan Bates, placed this affair at the center of attention. Under pressure from public opinion, Paula Vennells, head of the company between 2012 and 2019, had to return a decoration given to her by Queen Elizabeth II in 2018.
“I would also like to repeat the apologies in my testimony to Alan Bates and others who worked to expose this scandal. “I and those who worked with me made it much more difficult for them, and I am truly sorry,” she said. Previous testimonies from former Post Office managers implicate her, but when asked about her level of knowledge of the defects in the software or the actions taken against postal workers, she assured that she had not been informed for many years.
“I was overconfident,” she said. I think that some, myself included, made mistakes, did not see things, did not hear things,” she insisted, notably calling into question the practices of reporting information to the within the company or with its partner Fujitsu.
“How come you don’t know about this?” the lawyer representing the investigation, Jason Beer, asked him numerous times. “It’s a question I asked myself too. I learned things I didn’t know thanks to this investigation (…). I would have liked to know,” she argued several times. In 2015, she told deputies that she had not seen any denial of justice and that there was no problem with the Horizon software. Even before, in the summer of 2012, she had assured several parliamentarians that the legal proceedings carried out against the postal workers on that date had always vindicated the company. Which was wrong. “I completely accept that the Post Office (…) knew that,” she replied, with tears in her eyes, when questioned on this specific point. “Personally I did not know and I am deeply sorry,” she added, wiping her eyes with a tissue.