Paula Vennels being questioned at the Post Office Inquiry, followed by others - thread 2

[nauticant]

A continuation of the discussion started by@Sausagenbaconhere:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5080262-to-enjoy-hearing-paula-vennels-being-taken-apart

Paula Vennells' 3 days of evidence ends today but there are more hearings coming up and we can discuss those too.

When the hearings are going on, live-streaming can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/featured

All of the previous hearings can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947/videos

Thanks. I missed what he said

Here's a list of core participants, some of whom are asking Vennells questions today:

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/key-documents/named-core-participants-and-their-recognised-legal-representatives

Coming up now is National Federation of Subpostmasters. They're on a sticky wicket because they cooperated with Post Office in the lives of subpostmasters being ruined. They decided it suited their purposes to not believe the victims and in some cases spread stories around that they were trouble and best cast out.

I didn't properly catch who follows. Initially it was said "Sinclair" but now it's "Miss Singer". Maybe Miss Singer is representing Susan Sinclair who is a core participant and who was a very early victim in Scotland: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66964774

They should dig into her contract to see what she agreed to be responsible for.

I imagine it would include a lot of stuff that ‘she didn’t know about’ or that she claims was far too low level for a CEO to be directly involved in.

Just playing catch up...it was a toxic culture.

This is interesting about the core participants:

All of the individuals below (and those 9 Core Participants granted anonymity, and one additional Core Participant captured by the terms of the Restriction Order dated 3 February 2022 as varied 15 June 2022) have been found to be eligible for an award under section 40(1)(b) of the Inquiries Act 2005 for expenses incurred in respect of legal representation, as per the Notice of Determination by the Minister for London and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Minister for Small Business, Consumers and Labour Markets) under Section 40(4).

Without that you'd be looking at ruined subpostmasters facing hiring KC's for several thousand hours at, maybe, £600 an hour.

PV is absolutely repugnant. So interesting watching the questioners at work.

The PO seem very keen to claw back perceived "overpayments" to SPMs - perhaps they should start with PV's bonuses and salary as the success/failure of the PO was not due to anything she did as she knew nothing about anything ....

This break is rather longer than 10 minutes.

It always is haha. I was gonna check back in 5

@Lunde ,

They should at last pose the question about whether, knowing all that went on under her watch and with all her ‘regrets’, she feels comfortable retaining the £4.5 mio she was paid during her employment there.

Lee Castleton below

Lee bought a post office in Bridlington in 2003. But within a year huge discrepancies were appearing in his branch accounts.
He suspected the Horizon computer system was to blame and called the helpline 91 times pleading for help.
By March 2004 the unexplained losses had hit £25,000. He was suspended after an audit that same month and ordered to repay the money. He refused.
He was eventually taken to the High Court by the Post Office where he had to represent himself. When he lost his case, the Post Office pursued him for legal costs of £321,000 which bankrupted him.
"It changed our lives completely. It was absolutely terrible and devastating," he said.

Ha, now it's NFSP throwing their previous Chairman, George Thomson, under the bus.

The only good thing is she does have quite an invidious choice, to appear cruel and heartless or thick and lazy. I guess thick and lazy is better than slopping out on a daily basis but, to someone who is used to being deferred to and calling the shots, it must be quite upsetting.

Playing damsel in distress

Oh dear, the sentence is too long, I can't understand.

She is outrageous.

I honestly feel for these people. Like there's just some things in life you can't quite move on from.

This is absolutely appalling

She might not be that cunning if she ends up facing POCA consequences and the way things are going, she might.

I hate the cold, calculated moral rot like her, she deserves every bit coming her way.

Part of legal prep (if you can pay for it) for getting a grilling in court is to be wary of long sentences with sub-clauses because you can find yourself commenting on one part which can then be spun as commenting on other parts.

I had to go out so I’m catching up and way behind all of you, but I’ve just got to the point where PV says all she’s worked on for the last few years is the enquiry and that’s been her ENTIRE focus.

IIRC didn’t Mr Beer say either yesterday or on Wednesday that she’d been invited to contribute her thoughts in advance but she declined to do so on the grounds that there was no need, the enquiry would be establishing the facts? So WTF was she actually doing while ‘working’ on the enquiry for all this time?

[I just checked and it’s on Nick Wallis’s blog, he puts it much better:

Jason Beer KC (who asked questions on behalf of the Inquiry) reminded Vennells that in August 2023 the Inquiry wrote to her telling her that in her witness statement they would like her to: “reflect on your time at the Post Office and set out whether there was anything you would have handled differently”.
Beer took Vennells to paragraph 1801 of her witness statement, which states: “With the benefit of hindsight, there are many things I and the Post Office should have done differently. I am now reflecting with care on these matters and I will expand upon them and answer them as fully as possible when I give my evidence to the Inquiry.”
Beer was curious. “given you provided a 775-page witness statement that took seven months to write, could you not have reflected on what you could and should have done fully and differently within the witness statement?”]

That would have been a very expensive document to produce. Did other people notice how Jason Beer effectively ignored it, in terms of presenting his arguments?

How did she not know about Scotland

If only. Back in my very first job our tea lady knew absolutely everything that was going on in every department. We used to call her the Oracle.

Unlike Paula who clearly knows absolutely fuck all about anything, ever.

She don’t know anything

Oh suddenly she knows a lot about Scotland

Quite so. My pals on the front desk and on the cleaning teams were useful founts of information. My HoD was genuinely surprised how much I could glean from them, the great big snob, not that I named sources specifically.....