Paula Vennells was back in Phase 5/6 of the Post Office Inquiry and now we're at Phase 7 - thread 5

[nauticant]

A continuation of this thread about the Post Office Inquiry:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5105378-paula-vennells-is-history-but-now-at-the-post-office-inquiry-is-fujitsu-distinguished-engineer-gareth-jenkins-thread-4

The Inquiry is at Phase 7 which is about how things stand now and looking to the future. Here's the timetable:

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/phase-7-timetable

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

As an example of the chaos that continues at Post Office, Brocklesby was recruited, put on a contract while waiting for the government to approve his appointment so he could be formally employed, that never happened, he remained as a contractor, but that was only for a year because when the new interim chair arrived he gave Brocklesby the boot so that a new CTO, being a favourite of the chair (ie they're both from Camelot), could be appointed, but the new CTO is also an interim appointment.

Ah, that explains it!

You're so good @nauticant. I can't believe I missed that.
You pick up on everything.

I'm still not over how you picked up on Lord Grabiner and Lord Neuberger having a personal grudge against Justice Fraser and having a "war".
My mind is still blown 😐

It was quite comical when Sir Wyn asked who has replaced Chris as the new Chief Transformation Officer, and Chris said it is an 'interim" guy.

Sir Wyn said "another interim?"

😂

I don't think even Sir Wyn can keep up with this high turnover of Senior Executives.

I still can't get over their conduct. And how as a result the litigation went on in a massively damaging way, with Post Office wasting tens of millions, or maybe of over a hundred million pounds, of tax-payers money, and in the process they were enriched hugely.

And the worst of it was them playing a game in the midst of all this chaos to settle some kind of animus.

Good morning.
Today we have:
Veronica Branton – former Company Secretary of Post Office Ltd
And
Rachel Scarrabelotti – Company Secretary of Post Office Ltd

Although that said, at thIs point Rachel maybe a former secretary as well. Who knows with POL 😁

"Alisdair Cameron, Chief Financial Officer,has been on sick leave for over a year ..."

What with? Stress?

Rachel Scarrabelotti is another legal bod from the Antipodes. For some reason a fair few of the legal people at Post Office have that origin.

She is, though, borderline inaudible.

She's delivering a bland corporate message that, overall, is reassuring that things are improving at Post Office. Pushes back whenever she's asked to make any admission that might be too awkward. But then she's only been in post since 2022 so it's plausible that what she's saying reflects what she's encountered.

In a roundabout and coded way she's saying the SPM NEDs shouldn't be on the Board, and instead should be downgraded to non-positions where they can moan to the executive. This reflects her much earlier statement that some people treat the Board as "a confessional".

If she's to be believed, the executive and Board were told that there was a potential issue with the SPM NED Jacobs and this triggered Foat to open an investigation into Jacobs. Seems a strange way to be carrying on.

According to Scarrabelotti, before Jacobs joined the Board he was regularly making repayments for shortfalls but then he stopped doing this, with the implication that joining the Board triggered him into not behaving properly.

This evidence does provide some information about why Jacobs was investigated for having a conflict of interest. In Scarrabelotti's version, Jacobs was aware of a significant and growing shortfall and should have declared this to the Board when discussing shortfalls of SPMs in general.

There's a very significant conflict of evidence here in terms of what Jacobs knew.

Just started watching Rachel Scarrabelotti.

She is very softly spoken

There is one curiousity. If I heard right she's submitted 6 witness statements. That's with her being very much a second or third order witness. Which suggests she's closely following the Inquiry and whenever there's evidence from someone that has an impact on what she'll give in her evidence in the future, she files a statement to clarify things in a way that suits herself. That's a higher level of caution than I've seen from any other witness.

https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/all-evidence?search_api_fulltext=&field_witness=678

Later on, possibly in an echo of Scarrabelotti's cautious approach, Sir Wyn Williams was asking questions about the Board now operating with an excessive degree of caution. (With an eye on the upper levels of Post Office being in a state of paralysis that inhibits effective decision-making.)

The final part of her evidence is her criticism of Staunton, meddling in ways to suit himself, for example in his performance being reviewed and in the appointment of the senior NED.

Looking at her caution in giving evidence, this is her being distinctly forthright and it is compatible with how Staunton came across in his evidence.

She's finished her evidence. That's for the best, I was grinding my teeth over many of her answers ending with a rising inflection.

So sorry, but I'm going to give up today.

I will probably watch this evening and put it on x 1.5 speed.

Now it's Veronica Branton, a former company secretary.

Another very quiet witness. Maybe that explains why company secretaries seem to have had very little impact on what happened at Post Office.

She was in post 2018-22 and her boss was Jane MacLeod so she was there when interesting stuff was going on.

The broad issue being explored here is how the Board were able (or more accurately not able) to get the right kind of information to be properly informed about the mess Post Office was in around the time of the High Court judgments.

Now moving on to what night be the real purpose for this session. Looking into how the bonus target for top management of Post Office for cooperating with the Inquiry and the false statement about Sir Wyn Williams providing a sign-off could have come about and then not be corrected/sanity-checked.

There was an interesting exchange at the very end. Branton made clear that she viewed Post Office as a potential basket case towards the end of her time there and that one of the problems it faced was that it was difficult to recruit senior people because working there was such an unappealing prospect. Apparently Branton was very upfront about warning people about what they were getting themselves in to.

She was asked if she shared these views with her successor as Company Secretary, who actually was the morning's witness, Scarrabelotti. It had to be dragged out of her that, no, she'd not put this in writing. She explained that was because it's not something she'd commit to written form and instead would do this verbally instead. So did she verbally warn Scarrabelotti? It took some arm-twisting to get a "no" out of her.

I missed following up on Branton's testimony about how the bonus target for top management of Post Office for cooperating with the Inquiry came about. Branton said that after the Common Issues Judgment was handed down the top of Post Office was chaotic in a number of respects and in some situations governance went out of the window. For example, meetings of the remuneration committee happened outside of a formal framework so no meeting notes were taken and people who would have regard to cooperate governance like the Company Secretary weren't present. This resulted in bonus targets being decided on, with no information preserved about how they came about, that anyone with any sense would have looked at and said "you must be having a laugh".

Thank you @nauticant for the updates.

I couldn't cope with Rachel Scarrabelotti rising inflection at the end of every bloody sentence.
She was worse than the Kardashians!