Paula Vennells repeatedly burst into tears during her first appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry as she mounted a desperate bid to salvage her reputation. The disgraced former boss of the Post Office offered an apology to subpostmasters caught up in the scandal, dubbed the worst miscarriage of justice in British history.
But Ms Vennells, who ran the group from 2012 to 2019 as the scale of the scandal emerged, was blindsided by the inquiry’s lead counsel Jason Beer KC with a series of damning revelations about her time as chief executive.
‘She’ll never cry as I have’
In her first public appearance since 2015, Ms Vennells said one of her key reflections on the scandal, which saw hundreds of postmasters wrongly convicted of stealing after the group’s defective accounting system made it appear as though money was missing, was that she was “too trusting”.
She also admitted she had made a false statement to a parliamentary probe in 2012, but unintentionally. “As the inquiry has heard, there was information I wasn’t given and others didn’t receive as well … I did probe and I did ask questions and I’m disappointed where information wasn’t shared,” Ms Vennells said.
But in a ruthless grilling that reduced her to tears at least three times:
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