Paula Vennells was done the other week, the Post Office Inquiry is now questioning associates and others - thread 3

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5081592-paula-vennels-being-questioned-at-the-post-office-inquiry-followed-by-others-thread-2

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

It looks like Thomson was willing to agree a PR statement on the Second Sight interim report, that did Post Office's bidding, before he'd even received the report.

Someone on the Mirror chat sidebar is looking forward to the Private Eye 'George Thomson Special Summer Bumper Edition'!

I’m looking forward to Nick Wallis's blogpost on this.

PV must have loved this guy and his lapdog organization 🙄

Panorama contacted NFSP to see if they'd like to contribute to an upcoming programme about Horizon and the very first thing he did was inform Vennells and co to make sure they were tipped off. He then engages with them to make sure his snitching doesn't come to light. He is contemptible.

If I hear 'we work closely with the Post Office' many more times I might put my foot through the screen

So his position is basically - it doesn't matter that many of his members were wrongly prosecuted, bankrupted and put in prison because Horizon did 70 million transactions correctly.🙄🙄🙄

He really is deeply awful in every way. Any meetings with him must have been torture. These emails are just horrific.

It’s like saying 'well, most of the water system is fine and most people drinking it don’t have any illnesses, only a few have been put in intensive care in hospital with e-coli so why should I be bothered about them? They should shut up, it’s all A MASSIVE SUCCESS!'

Mine is " I make no apologies...."

Yep, we get it. You're not sorry.

Yes.
He keeps telling us this, and laying out exactly his motivation for choosing not to understand it: that admitting Horizon was unreliable would impact the Post Office and thus impact SPMs (the ones who hadn't yet been screwed by Horizon).

I wonder how many members the NFSP will have by the end of the day - I would resign my membership after hearing this performance

That stumped him.......

He's admitted he put the brand reputation and money over the lives of SPMR.

That's what he stands for.

Blake getting to one of the fundamentals now. Even if only a very small number of subpostmasters had their lives ruined, why wouldn't the NFSP want to help that particular group of individuals? Thomson sounds deflated in giving a non-answer.

"Jumping on the bandwagon" - someone has been talking to Rodric Williams

It's interesting that phrases from the POL are now coming up in George's parlance

It finally came to me what the NFSP, as presented by Thomson, reminded me of:

https://watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Cowslip%27s_Warren

George is totally captured by POL

'People will want their money back ...' [from NFPM]

'I'm too open'

'I was too trusting'

So George is very concerned with protecting the interests of HQ staff - but not so much the SPMs

The ole' "Prince Andrew defence"

Wow, the logic. 'We can't accept your complaints because Horizon is sound and we know this is the case because otherwise we'd have had other complaints'.

Blake only has 5-10 minutes of cross-examination remaining and expects that the session will be done by 3pm.

Proceedings resume at 13.55.

Lunch break till 1.55 pm. About ten minutes of Mr Blake and then the other barristers till 3pm. It is ending today at 3pm.

Oops, x post!

Well, that really was all very parallel universe from George Thomson.