Paula Vennells was back in Phase 5/6 of the Post Office Inquiry and now we're at Phase 7 - thread 5

I agree @dewfirst

He is continually contradicting himself.
He gives an answer, an hour later its pointed out that he has contradicted himself, but then he changes his answer again.

Oooo - Nick is getting snappy now

I am trying to follow but busy working at the same time so may have missed salient points but hasn’t Read spent today contradicting himself?
I’m left wondering if his ‘career trajectory’ was simply moving every time his poor performance became a liability- Peter Principle ? Given a fabulous reference and moved on …… and he believes he’s done a great job and is worth so much more?
Christ on a bike !!

Nick Read is ....

They are now looking a letter from one of POL criminal lawyers dated May 2024.
This letter was posted on POL website.

The letter says that SPMRs who haven't yet appealed are most likely guilty.

Read doesn't know:
..why this crim8nal lawyer wrote thus letter
...why it was posted to POL website.

Read knows nothing

Beer is going over Read's letter to the Lord Chancellor, saying POL don't think it's wise to introduce legislation to overturn all the convictions.

Reads answer: waffle, waffle, waffle, that's not what I meant, even though that's what I wrote.

Beer is kicking off today, going back over Read's assertion that POL shouldn't not be in charge of the redress Schemes.

A witness statement from Tom Cooper stares that the Government put forward a paper stating that POL should not administer the redress schemes in 2020.
The POL Board disagreed and set up the Remediation Unit.

Read disagrees, and continues to assert that he thought it was a bad idea for POL to be in charge of the redress schemes.

But that doesn't make any sense.
Here was a perfect opportunity for Read, as the CEO, to say to the Board "Right guys, we are going to follow Government advice and not be incharge of the redress scheme". But he doesn't.

Beer asked him why he didn't do that and Read says "good question" and then doesn't answer it.

Unbelievable.

All in all, my summary of the last 2 days and Nick Read is: I'm not impressed.

If the government want my opinion, he really wasn't worth the £430,000 salary + £415,000 yearly bonus

It's his waffling that aggrevates me the most. He can't give a straight forward answer.
It's like he thinks we will all get bored listening to him and go away.

Tomorrow should be interesting when the core participants Mr Maloney and Mr Stein asks thier questions.

Mr Stein is not known for accepting billy bullshit answes 😂

I agree with that.

Perhaps there is conversations happening to do this.

INAL, but could a judge in a civil proceedings case potentially reject hearing a Case like that, seeing as there are Conpensation/Redress schemes already in place.
I.e. could the Judge say, "You have to go through the Scheme first, before lodging a High Court case"?

Something else I remember from the Select Committee.
The POL lawyers were questioned why it is taking so long to pay out the redress.

POL lawyers said its very complicated. The example they gave was calculating the amount of redress for the mental and emotional harm. The calculations to determine how much for this is complex and difficult. Which I can kind of see.
How do you come up with an amount for causing someone to have depression?

But, the POL lawyers explained they use case law and calculations methods based on botched plastic surgery cases!
They have case law in which people who suffered emotional/mental distress from botched plastic surgery were paid damages, and this is what they use.

The MPs were not impressed.

No, it's not enough. I'm sure they said in the Select Committee that they will be approaching the Treasury for more money.

I think its a bit of both, Government would definitely rather POL carry the can... but POL definitely have seen the benefits in dragging it out and making it really fucking difficult for claimants to actually claim.

As for 'POL shouldn't have been the ones to run the compensation and redress scheme and we should have said so'...

No shit sherlock, but you didn't want to say that, because by running it you could continue blaming SPMR and screwing them over to your hearts content.

I am going to disagree with you slightly @nauticant .

The Treasury have allocated £1.2 billion for all the different redress schemes.
Only a small % has been paid out by POL.

Out of this £1.2 billion includes the fees for the POL Lawyers.

My view is POL and its lawyers are dragging this out, so that the lawyers can increase thier fees.
If they had service level agreement for say, 1 year in which to pay out all the redress, then the lawyers only get 1 years of fees.
But, if they can drag this out for years and years, the lawyers will score quite handsomely from public money.

I may be wrong, but I watched the Select Committee with the POL lawyers dealing with the redress scheme, and they seemed shifty to me.

Yes I noticed that - he really struggled for the first few questions that related to that case

I'm.just starting to watch Mr Henry now.

Mr Hebry sounds really broken, like he is trying to hold back tears.
He doesn't normally sound like this.

I've been in meetings all afternoon, so I'm 1hr 30 mins behind, clearly I'm about to see something astonishing!

Yes. Yes he has.

I wonder how he spent his leave his absence. It certainly wasn't preparing for this inquiry

Just WOW… that last 10 minutes really cut to the chase
Bet Mr Read is very glad to be out of there now.

'You could certainly draw that conclusion'...

Should have said 'only an idiot could argue anything else'...