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

Happy Friday everyone.

I have the afternoon off work, so sitting down for this afternoon's session.
Thanks everyone for the updates for Jo Swinson.

I'm "looking forward" to Moya Green.
In particular if they get into the what's app messages between her and Paula Vennells and why she thought her very good friend knew all along about this miscarriages of justice.

I was broadly on board with her version. There's plenty more she could have done but having seen 4 Post Office ministers now, I'm forming a view of them having less freedom of movement than I would have thought, and plenty of activity to keep them in the dark.

I still have some hopes for Baroness Neville-Rolfe.

Swindon arguing with counsel for Vennells there about what Vennells knew, ie the Clarke advice. It would have been better for Swinson simply to say there's the admission in the Vennells-Perkins email exchange, and that she knew no more than that. That was a pointless argument.

Overall, Swinson's argument is that ShEx felt it suited its purposes to manipulate the responsible minister and to that end they were allied with Post Office against the minister and thus against the public interest.

That's certainly consistent with evidence we've heard from a number of people over the past few weeks.

Dame Moya Greene up now. I was wondering about her accent, she's Canadian and has a civil service background.

Comes across as no-nonsense so far but I assume there's not a great deal at stake for her.

I don't see the point in questioning the CEO of Royal Mail about remote access into the Horizon system in 2011. To no one's surprise she knew nothing about it

So far, Moya hasn't added much, to what we already know.

Thuis is just my impression, and maybe I am wrong.
But to me it seems the Royal Mail Group, knowing POL will be separate from them soon, kind of did a half-hearted touch base on Horizon and Prosecutions.

The sort off - I'll look like im interested, but this won't be my problem soon- type thing.

Uh-oh. Seems like Greene thinks the Post Office had its own legal function before separation from Royal Mail. I thought it had been established that it definitely did not. Investigation, yes, legal, no.

Could that be wishful thinking to distance the prosecution function from Royal Mail?

I think you're right @nauticant

If i remember correctly there was a whole hoo-haa about which lawyer will go to the Post Office from Royal Mail.

The Royal Mail had a huge group of lawyers and they were fighting - in a bad way - of which one of them would go to POL.

That's why POL got stuck with Jarnail Singh

She's saying there was a Criminal Law team in Post Office that was separate from the one in Royal Mail. Mr Stevens seems surprised by this, as am I.

This looks like a rewriting of history to put liability in a place other than in Royal Mail. I think she'd be well advised to make clear she was wrong then but knows better now.

It looks like Mr Stevens is well-prepared to go deep into Greene having a fundamental, and possibly convenient, misunderstanding about the Criminal Law services and that, in fact, they'd been run by Royal Mail on behalf of Post Office.

Oh dear, the inquiry IT system has crashed.

Do you think it's thinking: "FFS I've had enough. For over a year now I'm showing document after document, and these buggers keep denying knowing about them or reading them. I give up!"

😃

Greene is quibbling and trying to create uncertainty around the legal responsibility point. Having thoroughly lost this point already she really should have left it there.

It's like she thinks there are points in play that are there to be won.

Having justified prosecutions in theory on the basis that they can be managed so there's no problem, Mr Stevens follows up by asking Greene what the board of Royal Mail actually did in managing the risk of these prosecutions. Greene goes for the escape route of management speak and circular reasoning.

Her testimony is difficult to follow.

To me, there is a lot of double speaking. I'm struggling to follow what her point is.

She's back to this pretendy world in which, before separation, there was a team in Post Office that was responsible for the prosecution of subpostmasters, and that they, and the liabilities for the wrongful prosecutions, vanished from Royal Mail on separation back in 2012.

Part of the problem is that she is not separating what she knew in 2012 from what she knows now, and being specific about how they differ. It's all sorted of muddled together.

Here come the text/ what's app messages........

Argh, another "we were misled"

Everybody, absolutely everybody, are claiming they were misled.

It's like that spiderman meme - everyone pointing fingers at each other.

Mr Henry seems to think that Greene's evidence is with her having in mind that she was in charge of separation and flotation of Royal Mail, and so for her to accept the liabilities remained with Royal Mail to some degree would mean that she had participated in misleading the markets.

That would explain a great deal of her sometimes baffling evidence this afternoon.

Oops, Moya Green's lawyer asking a clarification question.

Maybe yo do a tiny bit of damage limitation?

Well, that's another week of Royal Mail/Post Office I saw nuffin, I know nuffin, nowt to do wiv me guv.

Thank you everyone for all the updates. Certainly has been enlightening

At the moment the rough estimate to completely settle the claims from the subpostmasters is in the order of £1 billion. That's a vast amount of money and so, unsurprisingly, there have been noises about Fujitsu footing part of the bill. But if Fujitsu has a financial liability, what about Royal Mail? After all, they did most of the prosecutions. Here's the trick, if the government starts talking about that, then I'd expect Royal Mail shareholders to start talking in terms of suing the government for misrepresentation in a prospectus as to the value of a company being floated on the stock market. I think that this could open up the possibility of both civil and criminal legal action.

That is such a huge can of worms, with executives, civil servants, and politicians potentially being in the frame that everyone with power will want to make sure that that can remains very solidly sealed.

I suspect that that was behind a lot of the evidence by Greene putting on a pretence that before separation Post Office had its own Criminal Law department that was separate from the one in Royal Mail.

You are very astute, nauticant.

Here’s the Guardian’s take:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/19/vennells-knew-prosecution-of-post-office-operators-was-wrong-inquiry-told

Sir Stephen Lovegrove, former Chief Executive of the Shareholder Executive wandered onto the issue of Royal Mail liability and the prospectus in his evidence on Monday. He admitted that the IPO came after his departure but had a strong view that any liability attaching to wrongful prosecutions would belong to Post Office and not Royal Mail and that lawyers would have crawled all over the prospectus to ensure it met disclosure standards.

Mr Henry was trying to push the point of potential Royal Mail liability but in the end Sir Wyn intervened, not I think as he thought the point invalid, but that Sir Stephen was the wrong person to be interrogated.

What jumped out at me was that Paula Vennells would have probably wanted to hug Sir Stephen but that it was more that the government generally would wish to avoid the Royal Mail IPO be questioned - as I am sure it already is having legal queries coming its way from cross/aggressive lawyers.