Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, has continued to maintain her innocence, saying she remains “devastated” that other executives did not share crucial information about the faulty Horizon IT system.
Lawyers for Vennells, writing on her behalf in closing submissions to the inquiry into the Post Office scandal, said no evidence had emerged to show she “acted in bad faith”.
Vennells has previously publicly named five executives who she said were to blame for the scandal, but her lawyers said that she had “no desire to point the finger at others”.
“Despite Ms Vennells repeatedly attempting to resolve concerns of the subpostmasters during her leadership, she simply did not get the information which she ought to have been given by her senior team, whom she trusted and to whom she delegated responsible role,” her lawyers said in the submission on Monday.
“She had faith in them. She is devastated by the fact that information was not shared with her. She has no desire to point the finger at others, nor to speculate as to why information was not shared.”
Vennells, who was chief executive at the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, gave three days of testimony to the inquiry earlier this year denying knowledge of the faulty basis on which the prosecutions were carried out, saying that she was “too trusting” of key executives.
When she told the inquiry, through tears, that she “loved the Post Office”, Sam Stein KC, representing victims, accused her of talking “absolute rubbish”.
“Ms Vennells cannot, and does not, try to hide from the fact that whilst chief executive she did not manage to uncover the truth about the extent of the bugs, errors and defects in Horizon,” her lawyers said in a 138-page closing submission.
“This is a matter of deep and constant personal regret to Ms Vennells, as is the fact that the convictions of the subpostmasters were not overturned sooner.”
More than 900 branch operators were prosecuted, hounded for money and in some cases pushed to suicide between 1996 and 2015 after errors in the Horizon software system produced financial shortfalls in their branches.
The Post Office continued to fight branch operators seeking justice until 2019.
“Throughout Ms Vennells’ written and oral evidence, borne out through the documents and evidence of others which have been adduced during the inquiry, there has been nothing to show that she acted in bad faith,” her lawyers’ submission says. “Ms Vennells wanted to do right by the subpostmasters.”
In February, Vennells was formally stripped of her CBE for “bringing the honours system into disrepute” over her handling of the Horizon crisis.
Moya Greene, the former head of Royal Mail from 2010 to 2018 and Vennells’ boss until the Post Office was split off in 2012, told the inquiry that she thought Vennells knew the prosecution of Post Office branch owners was wrong.
In a series of text messages between the two over the past few years, Greene, who was at first supportive of Vennells, told her in one final communication: “I don’t know what to say. I think you knew”.
In its closing submission to the inquiry, the Post Office pointed the finger at Fujitsu, which built and managed the IT system, saying that the organisation had always been the “subordinate partner both contractually and in terms of technical capability”.
The Post Office said that the organisation did not have a “sufficient understanding of how Horizon operated”, and that the Japanese company’s “internal understanding of their own processes was deeply flawed”.
“Post Office’s acceptance of Fujitsu’s assurances about Horizon’s accuracy led to inaccurate and misleading statements being made by senior Post Office officers,” the organisation said in its 103-page closing submission.
“Post Office recognises that their dependence does not absolve Post Office of its own responsibility to postmasters to have provided a reliable IT system. [However], criticisms of Post Office can be fairly made in this respect, but any criticism ought to take into account Post Office’s dependence on Fujitsu throughout.”
