SHAME ON PAULA VENNELLS Paula Vennells cried at the inquiry. Read her emails before you feel sorry for her. Paula Vennells ran the @PostOffice from 2012 to 2019. Its computer system, Horizon, showed money missing from branches when none was missing. More than 900 postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015. Some went to prison. Families lost homes, savings and reputations. The inquiry @PostOffInquiry says at least 13 people are thought to have taken their own lives because of the scandal. Now look at what was happening at the top. In July 2013 Paula Vennells asked her husband for a less emotional word than bugs. He suggested exception or anomaly. The inquiry's lawyer called it Orwellian. In August 2013 she wrote that the hope of the mediation scheme for postmasters was to avoid or minimise compensation. At the inquiry she agreed it was possibly her hope. After a row with her top lawyer, Susan Crichton, Paula Vennells wrote that Susan Crichton was possibly more loyal to her professional rules and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business. A lawyer with integrity. Terrible for business. In September 2013 Paula Vennells asked for a Horizon risk reference to be removed from the Royal Mail @RoyalMail share sale prospectus, then told the Post Office chair she had earned her keep. Around the same time postmaster Martin Griffiths attempted suicide. Paula Vennells emailed that such cases usually have several contributory factors. Martin Griffiths died 3 weeks later. Former general counsel Chris Aujard told the inquiry that in November 2013 the executive team favoured ending prosecutions and Paula Vennells interjected that the Post Office should keep taking some. His notes recorded reluctance to stop because prosecutions acted as a deterrent. Prosecutions carried on for another 2 years. In December 2014 a @BBC One Show film showed postmasters fighting to clear their names. Paula Vennells wrote that Jo Hamilton lacked passion and that the rest of the film was hype and human interest. She told colleagues she was more bored than outraged. Jo Hamilton had been accused of stealing £36K. Her conviction was quashed in 2021. In February 2015 Paula Vennells told MPs the Post Office had won every Horizon case in court. In 2024 she admitted that was false and said it was unintentional. In March 2015 she wrote to Post Office minister Jo Swinson that there was no reason to conclude any prosecution was unsafe. Jo Swinson later said the letter misled her. @guardian reported she collected more than £4.5M in pay and bonuses as chief executive. She was given a CBE for services to the Post Office and charity while 555 postmasters were suing the Post Office. She left the Post Office during that court case. From April 2019 she chaired Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (@imperialNHS) for £60K a year. A document shown to the inquiry says the government shareholder asked in 2014 whether she was still the right person to lead, citing lack of knowledge. Lesley Sewell, her former head of IT, told the inquiry that Paula Vennells contacted her 4 times in 2020 and 2021, hoping preparation might help avoid an independent inquiry. Lesley Sewell blocked her number. In January 2024 Dame Moya Greene, former Royal Mail chief executive, told Paula Vennells she thought she knew and could no longer support her. Paula Vennells denied it. Then came May 2024. 3 days at the public inquiry. 775 page witness statement. 7 months to prepare it. Tears. Apologies. She said she had been too trusting. She said information had been kept from her. She named 5 former executives as having let her down. She apologised to Jo Hamilton for being rude in her email. The inquiry lawyer asked if she was the unluckiest CEO in the UK. Unlucky.. is one word for it. There is another way to look at the record. A CEO who wrote that mediation was meant to avoid or minimise compensation. A CEO who told MPs something she later admitted was false. A CEO who wrote to a minister that she saw no reason to conclude any prosecution was unsafe. A CEO who collected a reported £4.5M while postmasters lost everything. A CEO who later told the inquiry she had been too trusting. More than 1.2M people signed a petition for her to lose the CBE. The King forfeited it on 23 February 2024. As far as I can find, nobody at the top has been charged and nobody has reported her repaying a bonus. The final inquiry report is not out yet. Police are still investigating. Jo Hamilton, the woman Paula Vennells wrote off as lacking passion, said afterwards she is in two minds on whether the apology was genuine or came from being so publicly ashamed. The emails are public. Read them. Then decide who in this story deserves your sympathy. Share this. Postmasters were ignored for years while the people above them were paid, decorated and given new jobs. Sources @itvnews @DailyMail @ComputerWeekly @Independent @PostOffInquiry

LAW FIRM THAT DESTROYED TRACY MCFADDEN'S CASE ALSO PAID ED DAVEY 60,000 POUNDS A YEAR Tracy McFadden ran a shop and post office in Sandiacre Derbyshire for 14 years. She put 250k pounds of her own money into building it in 2002. Business was going so well she was planning to expand. Then the Horizon system flagged a discrepancy and her life fell apart. Tracy McFadden did the responsible thing. She called the Horizon helpline for help. The debt magically doubled to 2,000 pounds overnight. Then it kept climbing. 4,000. Then 16,000. Tracy had no way to check the system herself because she was never given proper access to it. She was told to accept the debt or lose the right to trade. So she accepted a debt that never existed just to keep her doors open. She only escaped a criminal prosecution because witnesses vouched for her, including the wife of a regional Post Office manager. Her contract was terminated in 2014. The business was gone. The reputation was gone. Tracy McFadden went from running a thriving shop to what she describes as begging for benefits. Now here is the SHOCKING part. This was never just a broken piece of software. It was a chain of people who knew and chose their careers over the truth. Post Office executives signed off on prosecutions built on a system riddled with bugs. Fujitsu built that system and stayed quiet for years while it destroyed lives. Ed Davey was postal affairs minister from 2010 to 2012 while all of this was unfolding. When campaigner Alan Bates asked him to meet about serious concerns with Horizon, Ed Davey told him a meeting would not serve any purpose. Years later Ed Davey took a paid consultancy with Herbert Smith Freehills, the very law firm hired by the Post Office to fight the sub postmasters in court, earning 275k pounds for his time there. His brother Henry Davey was a corporate partner at the same firm. What a coincidence. Tracy McFadden was one of 555 claimants in the group litigation against the Post Office. They won. Technically. Legal costs swallowed most of the settlement before the victims ever saw a penny of it. A computer did not do this to Tracy McFadden. People did. People who had every chance to stop it and chose their fees and their careers instead. SOURCES @BBCNews @itvnews @ComputerWeekly @nickwallis

Janine Powell ran a Post Office branch in Tiverton, Devon. In 2007 @PostOffice bosses accused her of stealing £74,000. Their own courts later found the Post Office knew its Horizon system had bugs from the earliest days of its operation. They prosecuted her anyway. Post Office lawyers offered her a deal, plead guilty to false accounting and they would drop the theft charge. She said no, she wasn't pleading guilty to something she hadn't done. So they took her to trial in Exeter in 2008 and got their conviction. The judge gave her 18 months. She walked into prison two days after her daughter's 10th birthday. She served five months behind bars, then three more wearing an electronic tag. She left three children behind, aged 10 to 18, in the care of friends because their mother was in a cell instead of at home. She came out with a criminal record that made her unemployable, a hometown she felt too ashamed to walk through, and depression that pushed her toward suicide. This was never a rogue glitch nobody noticed. The Court of Appeal later ruled the Post Office "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "steamrolled over" any subpostmaster who challenged it, calling the prosecutions an affront to the conscience of the court. Post Office lawyers hid evidence of Horizon's faults from courts, prosecutors and defence teams, to protect the organisation at all costs. Powell's conviction was quashed in 2022, one of hundreds overturned in what is now Britain's widest miscarriage of justice. More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 by an organisation that knew its own evidence was rotten and used it anyway. Janine Powell has given evidence to the ongoing public inquiry. More than 45 people connected to the scandal are now under criminal investigation. Still, nobody who signed off on her prosecution has spent a night in the cell they sent her to. SOURCES @BBCNews @itvnews @nickwallis

POST OFFICE JAILED AN INNOCENT MAN Harjinder Butoy and his wife ran a @PostOffice branch in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, for 5 years. They built something out of nothing. Then the auditors walked in one day and decided the numbers did not add up. Post Office accused him of stealing 206k pounds. A jury found him guilty in 2008. He was sentenced to 3 years and 3 months. Apparently prison was not punishment enough. The Post Office also slapped him with a confiscation order of 61,294.34 pounds, money he was ordered to pay back for a theft he never committed. A fine for a crime that only existed inside a broken computer system called Horizon. While he sat in a cell his wife had to move their kids into his parents house. The branch shut. The business gone. He was later declared bankrupt too. He served 18 months before release. It took until April 2021 for the Court of Appeal to finally quash his conviction, one of 39 postmasters cleared that day out of more than 700 prosecuted using evidence from the same faulty system. You would think that is the end of it. It is not. Years later he was still fighting for the rest of his compensation, having only received a fraction of the first stage payout. Clearing your name, it turns out, does not come with a same day refund. Butoy has said somebody needs to be prosecuted and locked up the way he was. Funny how accountability moves slower than a Post Office queue when it is aimed at the people who actually ran the Post Office. SOURCES @BBCNews @nickwallis @Karlfl

THE MAN THEY CALLED A NUTTER JUST GOT A KNIGHTHOOD In 2003, the Post Office fired Alan Bates from his small branch in Llandudno, Wales. The reason? He refused to repay £1,200 that the Horizon computer system had invented out of thin air. He invested £65,000 in that post office. He made 507 calls to the helpline. He kept meticulous records proving the software was broken. The Post Office's response was to terminate his contract and walk away. Their own internal documents called him "unmanageable." People at industry conferences called him a nutter and a thief. He couldn't afford a hotel room at one protest event. He slept in a tent. So naturally he spent the next 20 years building the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, dragging the Post Office into the High Court, winning a landmark judgment in 2019 that proved Horizon was riddled with bugs, errors and defects, and triggering the overturning of more than 900 wrongful convictions. Over 900 people were prosecuted. Around 700 convicted. 236 went to prison. The scandal was linked to at least 13 suicides. The compensation bill has now passed £1.2 billion. Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) knew about the bugs from 1999. The Post Office (@PostOfficeNews) knew. They prosecuted people anyway. Then they destroyed the evidence, sacked the forensic accountants when they got too close to the truth, and deleted social media comments from victims. Paula Vennells, the CEO who presided over much of it, collected a CBE. She kept it for years. Bates turned down an OBE in 2023 specifically because of that. He finally accepted a knighthood in 2024. After the ITV drama. After the public inquiry. After the nation had caught up with what he'd been saying since 2003. Twenty years. Sleeping in a tent. Called a thief by the people who were supposed to represent him. Sir Alan Bates was right from the start. The institution was lying from the start. That is the whole story. Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews | @ITVNews | @guardian |