Paula Vennells is history but now at the Post Office Inquiry is Fujitsu distinguished engineer Gareth Jenkins - thread 4

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5094266-paula-vennells-was-done-the-other-week-the-post-office-inquiry-is-now-questioning-associates-and-others-thread-3

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

Apols - I misheard that one.

process ... risk management ... development ... committee ... evolving ... complexity

... including ShEx having no reason to see risks being present in the Post Office asset.

I definitely preferred the evidence in the morning.

I don't think you did. I'm just musing aloud that BOI had these fellas popping in for half a day here and there post crash. Don't mind me!

He's got a habit at falling into management speak in order to provide answers that obscure his meaning. Giving him the benefit of the doubt there that he actually intended to provide useful information.

It looks like he's here to give one message: everything he did that people might find fault with is down to ShEx being misled by the executive of Post Office, but in any case ShEx wasn't really responsible for anything tangible in terms of what went wrong.

I'd imagine that corporate governance can be made interesting, but this guy and yesterday's is not the way to do it.

Another one who seems to have insulated himself against hearing troublesome news. His only interaction with Post Office was meeting the chair twice a year and the only other person he'd interact with was CEO of ShEx.

I wonder how much he was paid?

And he had to recuse himself over POL / Bank of Ireland transaction arrangements.

What a dismal witness this is. He was just there to add another bit of flair to his CV already brimming with stuff, and to collect the money. I'd imagine he did some of The Big Strategic I Am in the infrequent meetings he attended but there's no evidence of anything else going on.

But he is useful in one regard, he serves as another jigsaw piece in filling in the picture of how the scandal could have happened.

He didn't know about Second Sight. Oooh.

Makes you wonder what use is a board at all?

It's all very 'in theory this looks like a good flowchart of governance' style of 'privatisation', designed by civil servants to mimic independence with oversight, that is impossible to achieve in practice.

After over an hour of avoiding saying anything of substance, something finally slipped out. He thought Alice Perkins didn't have the experience to be chair of Post Office. I think that means that in his community she's no longer viewed as "one of us".

Statement 21/47 being tested here, re O'Sullivan's approval of the Deloitte team doing a review.

He appears to be claiming a staggering ignorance about the prosecutions?

(I personally think that O'S jumped in 2014 when he saw the writing on the wall, citing his commitments at Old Mutual.)

He's parroting the line that's been common recently "why should I have been interested in these Second Sight people who were clearly nobodies?"

This is turning out to be very illuminating.

In ShEx documents he's identified as POS. Going for the polite version of that abbreviation, it's Point of Sale, ie the Horizon terminals the subpostmasters used.

'What would get through to you, Mr OS?'

'Coulda shoulda woulda ....'

This is an interesting, albeit hypothetical, question. Was there any way that a subpostmaster being persecuted by Post Office could have engaged directly with the single shareholder, and owner, of Post Office. The answer is "no".

Oh, that's nice, POS has made a recommendation. How worthy of him.

On to the flotation prospectus.

This section does raise the very interesting question: why did ShEx operate as not having many of the responsibilities that one might have expected to be reasonable?

No mention in the prospectus of the real future risk of the SPM prosecutions being challenged and overturned - he is being tested on this by Mr Henry. Mr Henry suggests the prospectus was 'heavily caveated', and that the flotation would have been 'dead in the water' if the prosecutions had been mentioned.

Witness disagrees, but does finally concur that the removal by POL senior staff of the mention of the risk presented by historic prosecutions was something that ShEx didn't know about, and that hypothetically could have changed everything.

So the Chair of ShEx just admitted the flotation prospectus was compromised, and dodgy as f*ck. Am I over-reaching here?

Did they say back on Friday?

Yes.

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/phase-5-and-6-timetable

This isn't a completely fixed timetable and things get moved about a bit as time passes.