Post Office inquiry live: Ex-boss Paula Vennells cries and admits evidence to MPs wasn’t true – BBC News

25 comments

1. I’ve been watching quite a lot of this inquiry live when I’ve had the chance. It’s really quite interesting.

2. Well it’s all well and good her crying now but pretty sure her victims cried and the PO didn’t care. I try not to jump to conclusions when I can, but with her, on this particular topic, I hope she gets jail time.

3. Anything less than jail time for this horrible excuse for a human being, and it’ll be *another* injustice that the victims will have to deal with.

   “Reaching for a tissue once again, she breaks down and is told by Beer to wait until she’s finished crying before trying to continue.”

   Cry me a river bitch.

4. Is there any realistic prospect of her facing prosecution?

5. Watching this in between doing bits of work and I’m wishing I’d made popcorn, she’s getting demolished. The questions generally have the subtext of “did you lie to us or did you were you astonishingly incompetent?”

   As I type this, she’s denied knowing that the Post Office brought criminal cases, and the guy questioning her has asked if she seriously didn’t know for the first five years that her company had a department of some 100 staff investigating and bringing cases. She’s done for.

6. I’m very sorry. I don’t remember. I wasn’t aware. I didn’t know. I wasn’t told. There wasn’t a conspiracy. I **did** mislead MPs though.

7. Like the kid at school getting caught trying to set fire to the building. Fuck her and all who sail in her.

8. CEOs: “we deserve big money because the buck stops with us”

   Also CEOs: “I don’t remember, I don’t know, it wasn’t my responsibility”

9. She isn’t the first criminal to cry for themselves because they’ve been found out and she won’t be the last

10. ‘I had a reputation for asking everyone what they did and how things worked’

    ‘…. Apart from that one guy who’s in charge of literally sending people to jail’

11. But why did they do this?  I don’t understand, was it to add people’s life savings to their profits, save face over Horizon?  What the hell was the point of it all?  They must have been just so pig headed they couldn’t admit their mistakes and just ploughed on with victimising people.

12. It looks pretty brutal – a public pillorying, basically.

13. Did she cry as the Post Office drip fed compensation to Martin Griffith’s widow to try and keep her silent?

    https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/26/post-office-tried-to-hush-up-martin-griffiths-case-inquiry-hears

    He attempted suicide in 2013 and died a few weeks later. His Parents used their life savings to try and pay back the “shortfall” in his account at the time, only it wasn’t his shortfall it was a Horizon error.

    They kept coming back to him until he broke.

14. Ow boo hoo she’s crying now because of all the peoples and families lives and livelihoods she ruined.

    Pull the other one, you knew what you were doing when you did it.

15. “Sorry is not an adequate word”. For once I agree Ms Vennells. I think the word you are searching for is “Guilty”.

16. One of the biggest issues here is the utterly awful manner in which any scandals are reported in real time, and the progression from a scandal real time to results in an inquiry years or decades later in the hope that people retire, die, or hopefully get forgotten about.

    It’s frustrating that this inquiry has not been done sooner.

17. Oh fuck off. No idea? The fuck was she doing there then?

18. Crying only when she was caught, I bet she was perfectly content for the past 10 years thinking the issue was sweeped under the carpet for good 

19. “It was from a point of compassion”
    Crocodile tears.
    Has she updated her will so “Ding Dong the WItch is Dead” is played at her funeral?

20. What I want to know about why the church hasn’t revoked her ordainment . The last thing that criminal should be able to do is preach morality.

21. Apparently she said she was ‘too trusting’. Just not very trusting of her employees who, despite not being in contact with one another when this started, *all* reported the same fault with their accounting system.

22. She’s just like a politician. Deaf, Dumb and Blind.

23. A friend of my parents was one of the men who got sent to jail, he literally lost everything, his wife left him because the court said the evidence was there so she believed he was guilty, the family home was repossessed as was his business, his friends thought he was a thief (my parents still feel guilty about this but to be fair you believe the evidence). He went from being a very respected postmaster and pillar of the community to working in a wood yard for peanuts and living in a caravan at the wood yard, to this day he is a shadow of what he was and no amount of compensation could make up for it. She deserves to go to jail for many years and be personally fined an absolute fortune. To stand by and let peoples lives be torn apart whilst knowing they are innocent goes beyond evil.

24. She needs to back up those tears with full and frank disclosure, handing over everything she’s touched including unhindered access to all her places of work, residence and full unedited electronic records. Anything less and those tears of hers are a total lie.

25. Prison needs to happen. People Killed themselves over these lies and she and her team allowed it to happen. Disgusting Human Being.