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

It is a little boring. He is saying what he is planning to do in the future.
Although, he used the term "induction package" instead of the stupid "onboarding" - so I like him 😂

Tomorrow, Thursday and Friday will.be the main course.

I'm about 10 minutes behind but did just watch an interesting intervention by Sir Wyn Williams. It was about the correspondence between Nick Read and Fujitsu with the latter suggesting that they will no longer be providing Horizon-related evidence to support prosecutions. SWW's view seems to be that this would still be the police investigating a potential crime and in such circumstances in general it would be surprising for any involved party to refuse to provide relevant information they hold to the police. This can be interpreted as SWW suggesting that Fujitsu were being performative in adopting a position that, ultimately, they probably wouldn't maintain.

That's interesting, because I interpreted it a little differently. I thought SWW was suggesting POL were being performative.

The only reason I say that is, SWW asked Rachel "Kardashian" Scarrabelotti a similar question.
SWW determined the following os the current process:
..1 POL investigate a SPMR for stealing and gather the evidence
..2 the POL Board have to then review the evidence and determine if they now want to report it to the police
..3 Police investigate and ask POL to disclose/give any information that will help with thier investigation.
..4 the POL Boatd decide what information and documents to share with the police.

SWW seemed a bit perturbed about why the Board would decide what info/docs would be shared with police. His point seemed to be why does the Board need to decide. Could it be the POL Lawyers and POL investigators can't be trusted to share all relevant documents with the police?

I don't know. I may be reading too much into this.

I may be stuck on POL history of non-disclosure during criminal trials and non-disclosure during the Inquiry.

That shows how much of this is open to interpretation. Maybe we're both partially right and SWW was giving a "plague on both your houses" message.

A plague on both your houses

😂

I'm.gpimg to use that at work tomorrow.

As a bonus, today's a Beer day!

However, the day opened with the announcement of the death of one of the core participant subpostmasters, one of the 555, who died before she was able to receive the additional compensation she was entitled to receive.

Straight into it. Read has made 4 witness statements, over 300 pages in total, with 1,2, and 4 being corporate witness statements and 3 being a personal one. Beer had him clarify that the corporate witness statements had been subject to approval by others. Hmmm.

Just trying to catch up, thankyou Nauticant and minou123 for your continuing commentaries.
So glad it’s Beer v Read.
I hope he shreds him.
Self satisfied twonk.

Read was recruited on the basis of a 7 page Position Specification that didn't mention Horizon, or the complexity of its replacement, or the civil litigation, or the Common Issues Judgment that had just been handed down. Of course, Read could have learned about some of this independently but there was a lack of candour.

An interesting detail. According to Read, the last prosecution of a subpostmaster was initiated in 2013.

Another example of the CEO being fed information by the General Counsel, in this case Ben Foat, meaning the CEO didn't have a true picture of what had gone on.

Good grief. When the Horizon Issues Judgment was handed down in late 2019 the executive and the Board were "nothing to see here, let's carry on as before". In Read's telling, massive denial of the mess Post Office was in. The only thing that mattered was "how do we reduce costs of running the business?"

Read does have an explanation for why he joined in the denial. He'd literally just walked through the door and was relying on people in the grip of self-serving delusions (that's my version).

Morning, just started watching, but I'll be on/off today.

Yay for Beer being back.

More good grief. Read met with the chairman Tim Parker in September 2019 and Parker hand-waved away the significance of the litigation Post Office had just lost, minimising its impact to a negligent degree.

In particular, Parker believed that the litigation wasn't the PR risk to Post Office that the government believed it to be.

This would be gripping enough but Beer doing the cross-examination is the cherry on top.

Once people were getting a sense of the mess at Post Office, the government were looking to provide redress to subpostmasters and the civil service wanted to focus on the financials of the business and not really solve the subpostmaster problem

I thought he was doing OK but it turns out that Read's fluency in talking about the chaos he walked in to in 2019 has not carried through to this current section about the culture at Post Office in 2024 and why some of the rotten stuff of the past hasn't changed.

I'm 30 mins behind. But so far Nick didn't know anything prior to taking up the post.

I'm exaggerating a little, but essentially he wasn't briefed by anyone. But surely all he needed to do was look at the press in 2019, Private Eye, Nick Wallis, Computer Weekly were all covering the GLO.

Then Nick could have questioned the Senior Execs and asked for an explanation to why his brief was different to the press reports.

Or am I being simple?

A telling discussion. Read is being asked about investigators getting bonuses based on numbers of successful prosecutions and amounts of money "recovered". This has been a point of interest since at least 2021, and there has been awareness within Post Office that more needs to be uncovered in this matter. This has gone nowhere. Clearly this is something Post Office knew it needed to remain ignorant about.

There it is. The recommendation at the top of Post Office in 2021 that discussion about this matter needed to be closed down.

According to Read he knew nothing about the bonuses or the attempt to cover this up by those around him in 2021.

That looks like Beer setting a trap: Are you saying that this kind of behaviour (ie covering things up) is unusual inside Post Office?"
Read: "Yes."

Urgh, this is so frustrating.

I'm at the bit where Beer is asking why staff who were involved in the scandal are now working on the compensation schemes.

Nick has tried to side step this question, but eventually agreed that only over the last couple of days have they started to look into this.

Beer asked the most obvious question: "why has this taken 5 years to look into?"

It seems Nick is missing the point. He seems to think that it is perfectly OK for these staff to work in the Remediation Unit because they haven't been "found" to have done anything wrong.
But he is missing the fact that from a moral point if view, it is completely wrong to have POL staff who were involved in the convictions of SPMR to now be working on the compensation scheme.