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

Contrary to what you might think, a business is not required to account for every single penny. The key question is materiality - in other words, whether any errors are significant. For a small business turning over £100k, an error of £10k is definitely material. For a business the size of Post Office, with a turnover of nearly £1bn, an error of £10k is unlikely to be material.

It is clearly a concern if a business has large amounts of money for which it cannot account. However, if no-one else claims the money, the business is allowed to keep it and add it to their profits. If the amounts involved are below the materiality threshold, the accountants are unlikely to question it.

However, I'm afraid that you can't keep it if the bank pays £1M into your account.

That's what the Horizon Shortfall Scheme was/is supposed to deal with:

The Horizon Shortfall Scheme was launched to independently assess applications from current and former Postmasters who believed they may have experienced shortfalls related to previous versions of the Horizon system.

Expressed in those terms it looks straightforward but things are much more complicated in practice.

The key question is materiality - in other words, whether any errors are significant. For a small business turning over £100k, an error of £10k is definitely material. For a business the size of Post Office, with a turnover of nearly £1bn, an error of £10k is unlikely to be material.

Indeed so. It seems that you are putting a Post Office management viewpoint - they were a large business therefore these sums weren't material. For the individual Post Offices those sums were material, and were material enough for the PO to bring prosecutions. I for one, just following this scandal have seen sums of £20,000, £36,000 etc. mentioned. Has anyone computed just how much people have paid up? There were c 900 people prosecuted so I could well imagine that it would total more than a million pounds which I think could be argued was material.

And OK so if no one claims the money, the organisation can eventually clear out their suspense account and take it as profit. But as yet, although I haven't read all the documents pertaining to this, it doesn't look as though a great deal of effort, if any, was expended in finding out where the money in the suspense account came from. Perhaps it could be argued that when the SPMs were querying the amounts they supposedly owed, they were in fact making a claim on the money.

Expressed in those terms it looks straightforward but things are much more complicated in practice.

And indeed, when you see the evidence unearthed in the last three days of the enquiry, it looks as though they were using this scheme to try to fob people off.

what still amazes me is the complete absence of common sense in all this. Literally overnight a large number of postmasters and postmistress's (who are the living embodiment of the term "salt of the earth") turn gangster at exactly the same time a new and uncertain bunch of software accounting systems are introduced. A fucking five year old could join the dots on that one. Or at least question it.

Didnt one of the witnesses say they took the view that the false accounting had been happening all along at a certain percentage, and that this just ‘proved it’

Yeah but if the joined the dots like 5 year olds - that’s mean they’d be wrong, and they’d look silly in the press. That was what the emails all eluded to, they didn’t want to be wrong and the press to make something of it - so instead they made it worse

To say that £10k here and there is immaterial to the post office just doesn’t stack up when the reason all this happened is because they were hellbent on ‘recovering’ these amounts, and when - for PV - getting the PO from the red into the black was her main raison d’être. And if you see the perverse glee in some of those emails, such as those about the Merthyr spm against whom they took legal action to ensure any sale of their house would revert to the PO. To say their accountants wouldn’t care about the odd £10k is contrary to everything they were doing over the whole 20 year period.

They're bloody lucky that nobody with a level of criminal intelligence and IT ability/access was aware of this - otherwise the doublecounting could have made somebody millions filtered off/credited 'back' but somewhere else.

people at Fujitsu knew!

wait sorry - no they wouldn’t have known about the accounting, my bad.

Confirmation bias was at work. The investigation team and, it seems, some others within Post Office had long believed that many subpostmasters had their hands in the till. Here was the proof they had been looking for.

Confirmation bias backed up by the fact that the woefully untrained investigators, who had no real knowledge of the legal framework that they operated in (see evidence by Bradshaw, Cottham etc), were paid a bonus contingent on how much cash they "recovered".

They came up with a gambit "threaten with prosecution for theft, accept a confession to false accouting", which was totally illegal but highly effective and so the bonuses flowed in.

Lawyers at PO offered no real oversight to the process, and the PO board insisted that everything was fine, and that the losses were real.

Just cutting and pasting from Nick Wallis:

More analysis of Paula Vennells:

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/paula-vennells-and-mark-davies-led-by-the-brown-nose/

Jane MacLeod in Australia: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/28137131/post-office-lawyer-australia-horizon-inquiry/

The One Show that triggered Vennells to slag off Jo Hamilton and others in her infamous email:

and the metal showed her true colours as she forgot the slogan "don't put in an email what you don't want read out in court" pardon...

I can’t stand The One Show but this was a decent feature. Vennells’ email is unnecessarily vile and weirdly vindictive - especially for a woman of the cloth. It’s the hypocrisy and duplicity that really unsettles me. I really do wonder how she squares it all with her conscience and all I can assume is that she believes she is a good person and therefore nothing she thinks or does could be wrong. Just like the Post Office is good and could not, therefore, be wrong. And Horizon is robust. She apologised (emptily) for being ‘rude’ in that email but showed no shame or embarrassment about it because she doesn’t really understand why her email was so dreadful. I’m not sure she has a full set of empathy bones. Sociopath? Narcissist? Something is amiss…

I have just watched the BBC2 about the theft at the British Museum. A Mr Bates type man realised that someone was stealing from the Museum and putting treasures for sale on EBAY. He wrote to the managers/ directors in charge of the museum. All his concerns were dismissed and he was made to feel that he was going mad
Do mangers actually do a good job I wonder.

I mean that these managers dismiss the truth because it is inconvenient to them and because it makes them look inefficient. Thank goodness for Alan Bates and Dr Gradel for refusing to be cowed and thus allow big institutions to make big mistakes because it is easier to ignore the truth.

Post Office scandal: Police to deploy 80 detectives for criminal inquiry | Post Office Horizon scandal | The Guardian

Seems like managers are there to uphold & manage the façade!

Edit:
@ThePearlSloth , it does feel to me as if something is missing from PV, her demeanour isnt quite right to me.

Posting here to see if anyone of you knowlegeable people might have a view on the Jane MacLeod issue as I've been mulling over it. I can see why Sir Wyn thinks its not worth trying to take a legal route to get her to attend as it would be pretty impossible to enforce. However, if he served her a s21 notice and she failed to comply that would still be a criminal offence I think (IANAL)? which would give the SRA a reason to strike her off so at least she'd no longer be able to work as a lawyer. Small and petty perhaps but still sends a message that you can't just bugger off to the other side of the planet with impunity.

There was an interesting series of posts on X from Prof Lucy Easthope (disaster management expert) a few days ago, commenting in the wake of PV's appearance. She mentioned that she was being contacted by people who'd worked with PV, wanting to communicate their experiences….and they weren’t good ones, unsurprisingly.

(Also, @Bushtika - I saw that too and was similarly amazed. How are these things allowed to happen? And keep on happening?)

Last night I was watching Vennell's and van den Bogard's appearances at the Parliamentary committee, which I think was 9 years ago now. The same dissembling was going on then. You would think that after that experience they would have sharpened up their acts and found evidence of the supposedly good things they had managed to do.

Look at Loŕd Arbuthnots evidence to this phase of the enquiry. I think he was after Alan Bates. Him and Mr Beer go through a very formal accusation that she told 16 very specific lies of omission at that meeting. It was an utterly complete condemnation of her conduct and honesty.

She was asked no direct questions about this meeting because she claimed (and I think correctly) that she was formally covered by parlimentary privelidge.

Watch Arbuthnots evidence again, now with that knowledge in mind. It is electrifying.