It is a moment wrongly convicted post office operators have waited years for. From Wednesday the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells will appear before the long-running inquiry into how hundreds were pursued in the courts, fined and jailed over accounting shortfalls that were actually the fault of the Horizon IT system.
Vennells, who held the top job between 2012 and 2019, has become the highest-profile face of the scandal since the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office galvanised public opinion when it was screened in January – despite her keeping a low public profile in the past decade.
Over that time, questions have arisen about what exactly she knew and when. Here are some of the apparent discrepancies the judge-led inquiry is likely to ask her to explain over her three days of testimony.
Why did she wrongly tell MPs in 2012 the Post Office had not lost a Horizon case?
Vennells met six MPs in 2012, shortly after becoming chief executive. A note of meeting given to the inquiry showed that Vennells told those present: “Every case taken to prosecution that involves the Horizon system thus far has found in favour of the Post Office.”
However, Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, told the hearings this claim simply was “not true” as at that time there had been three acquittals.
Why did the Post Office not disclose legal advice in 2013 highlighting problems with past prosecutions?
In July 2013, Simon Clarke, a barrister advising the Post Office, concluded there was a serious problem with past prosecutions because of an “unreliable witness”. Clarke said there were issues with evidence from the Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins because he had failed to disclose information he knew about bugs in the Horizon software to defendants. Clarke told the inquiry his advice had been sent to several Post Office lawyers. He added: “Where it went thereafter, I can’t say.”
Vennells is likely to be asked about whether she or the board had ever seen Clarke’s advice, how she had responded to it and why it had not been disclosed to defence lawyers before 2020.
Chris Aujard, a former senior lawyer at the Post Office, has told the inquiry that in 2013 the Post Office’s executive committee “were in favour of ceasing prosecutions entirely”, but Vennells said “limited” prosecutions should continue.
When Vennells wrote to the business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) select committee in June 2020, she said she “played no role in investigatory or prosecutorial decisions or in the conduct of prosecutions” and the legal team responsible for prosecutions reported to the general counsel. She added she was not a lawyer and relied on internal and external legal advice.
Did she mislead MPs about whether remote access through Horizon was possible?
Before appearing before the business, innovation and skills committee in 2015, Vennells sent an email to her head of corporate communications asking if the Horizon system developed by Fujitsu was indeed secure: “What is the true answer?” she asked. “I need to say: ‘No, [remote access] is not possible.’”
The day after her testimony, the Post Office sent MPs a letter saying there was “no functionality in Horizon” for anyone at the company or Fujitsu to “edit, manipulate or remove transaction data” in a branch’s accounts.
However, the inquiry has seen a transcript of a call from 2013 in which a senior lawyer confirmed twice that Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could adjust accounts remotely.
ITV has reported a further call from 2013 that details a meeting at which Post Office executives including Vennells were present, where the conversation explicitly mentioned allegations that accounts could be accessed remotely by Fujitsu.
Liam Byrne, the chair of the business and trade committee, said in April this year he was “deeply concerned” by the call transcripts and was considering options against Vennells, including “the Commons exercising its powers in relation to contempt of parliament”.
Vennells wrote to the BEIS committee in June 2020: “It is clear with hindsight that the information I was given about remote access was seriously inaccurate. I only became aware of this from the litigation, after I had left the Post Office.”
Why did the Post Office continue fighting the high court case from 2016?
Alan Bates and 554 other post office operators brought a high court lawsuit against the state-owned company to overturn their convictions in 2016 and the first part of the trial opened in November 2018.
By 2017, the Post Office had received a draft report by Deloitte, seen by the inquiry, which questioned whether Fujitsu could “edit or delete transactions recorded by branches in a way that could impact on the branch’s overall accounting position”. It concluded: “Yes – transactions can be deleted at database layer.”
Yet the company did not disclose the existence of that report to defence lawyers, instead choosing to spend millions maintaining that the branch operators were at fault. The Post Office ended up settling the litigation for £57.75m in 2019. The convictions were finally overturned on appeal in 2021.
During her time as chief executive, did she consider the possibility that Horizon might be flawed?
The Post Office’s chief financial officer, Alisdair Cameron, who wrote a document in 2020 about what had gone wrong with Horizon, told the inquiry his former boss Vennells “did not believe there had been a miscarriage [of justice] and could not have got there emotionally”.
He said: “She seemed clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong and it was very clearly stated in my very first board meeting. She never, in my observation, deviated from that or seemed to particularly doubt that.”
Vennells said in a statement to the Guardian: “I am truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system. I now intend to continue to focus on assisting the inquiry and will not make any further public comment until it has concluded.”
