The Post Office inquiry rumbles on and now it’s the turn of former chief executive Paula Vennells in the hot seat. It’s the first of her three days of hearings and already the former boss is not having a good time of it…
Vennells was quizzed on her leadership during the scandal, and how much she really knew of the institution’s troublesome Horizon IT system that was incorrectly registering losses at post office branches across the UK. While the system’s failings were not sufficiently flagged, anxious subpostmasters across the country desperately tried to make up for unexplained deficits by piling in their own life savings, with some Post Office workers remortgaging their houses to find the funds.
And today, as Vennells faced tough questions over her response to the scandal, the former Post Office chief couldn’t stop herself from bursting into tears when faced with the rather unflattering reality. Vennells was shown a clipping in which Vennells told politicians that ‘subpostmasters have been borrowing money from the Post Office account in the same way they might do in a retail business’ and there ‘had not been a case investigated where the Horizon system had been found to be at fault’.
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