Reverend Vennells, of the Post Office disaster

[Lilith7]

The Reverend Paula Vennells finally appears in court over the disaster with Brit Post offices. Some people committed suicide, some were  sent to prison. She doesn't appear to understand either the harm done or  contrition.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...eo-victims

The former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells would like the victims of the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history to know that she hasn’t actually done anything deliberately wrong, and that she honestly doesn’t understand how all this has happened. I guess she’s asking all the jailed and wrongly convicted subpostmasters to try to imagine being swept up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of undue blame. So … please add the murder of irony to her notional future charge sheet.
To Aldwych House in London, then, where Paula produced tears in time for the lunchtime bulletins and reprised them for the section in which her emails seemingly found her on a fishing expedition for other “contributory factors” that might have caused an appallingly persecuted subpostmaster to take his own life. 
For now, let’s just say Paula Vennells now “can’t recall” more about the Post Office than you’d expect a tenuously engaged CEO on 700 grand a year ever to have known.
Pressed early by the inquiry’s Jason Beer KC how on earth she hadn’t known what was going on, Paula explained: “I was too trusting.” Barely a quarter of an hour later this humblebrag had done a complete 180, as she said: “I was sometimes criticised at team development events for being too curious.” Was she? At one stage Vennells had even been unaware that her organisation employed a team of about 100 enforcers driving private prosecutions. I’m reminded of those people who worked for Bernie Madoff on the 18th and 19th floors in his offices, and somehow didn’t realise he and a crack unit were running the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme on the 17th.

[harm_less]

Paula Vennells was portrayed as a heartless corporately minded POS in the dramatisation of the situation and it would seem they had her characterisation spot on.

[Lilith7]

Paula Vennells was portrayed as a heartless corporately minded POS in the dramatisation of the situation and it would seem they had her characterisation spot on.

It certainly seems so - difficult to understand someone like that. You have to wonder whether they're genuinely incapable of understanding - which surely would mean a complete lack of empathy, & indicating sociopathy - or doing an excellent job of pretending not to care.

[Lilith7]

And now it seems she's blaming everyone else. How unsurprising.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/arti...ce-scandal

Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, has named five executives who she said were to blame for the Horizon scandal, including a missing IT expert and a former in-house lawyer who has refused to appear at the public inquiry.
During a third day of tearful evidence in front of the inquiry, Vennells denied she had given “craven and self-serving” testimony but readily provided the names of those she claimed had let her down.

Vennells, who was the head of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, has repeatedly claimed in evidence that she was denied information from her senior staff, and argued that she was “too trusting” of key executives.
Hundreds of Post Office 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.
“I loved the Post Office,” Vennells told the inquiry through tears, only to be accused by Sam Stein KC, representing victims, of talking “absolute rubbish”.

She added: “I regret hugely the group litigation, and I’ve seen all of the paperwork behind it, and in view of the judgments that were taken and where we are today, it is unacceptable reading.”
Vennells broke down under the questioning of barristers for the victims who accused her of hiding a deceptive nature by using “cloying managerial speak” and of living under a “cloud of denial” and providing “craven self-serving” evidence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11e45n3p5o

The room was packed with people, including many former sub-postmasters.
Their mood became more defiant as the day progressed, until at the end many booed Ms Vennells.
The question of remote access has been one of the themes of the inquiry.
The Post Office said in hundreds of wrongful prosecutions of sub-postmasters that they must have been to blame for money missing from accounts, which were calculated using the Horizon IT system.
Prosecutions between 1999 and 2015 meant some people went to prison, while many others were left financially ruined and lost their jobs, businesses and homes. Some died while waiting for justice.
On Friday, a landmark bill quashing the convictions of hundreds of former sub-postmasters received Royal Assent.

[zqwerty]

What a mess, brought on by people believing that computing machines and in particular software is infallible plus a good helping of management and middle-management incompetence and ignorance plus a lack of empathy and caring for fellow human beings plus possible maliciousness/greed amongst unknown persons with fingers on keyboards through remote access.

[Lilith7]

What a mess, brought on by people believing that computing machines and in particular software is infallible plus a good helping of management and middle-management incompetence and ignorance plus a lack of empathy and caring for fellow human beings plus possible maliciousness/greed amongst unknown persons with fingers on keyboards through remote access.

And its amazing that it was allowed to continue for so long too, when it must have been apparent that something was badly wrong.

[harm_less]

And Paula Vennells has been stripped of her CBE
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68384240

[Oh_hunnihunni]

I bet though, she will never take on the idea she was in the wrong. Sometimes we human beings simply cannot step out of our own created reality to 'see ourselves as others see us'.

Probably just as well, in some cases. The shock would be shattering.

[Lilith7]

I bet though, she will never take on the idea she was in the wrong. Sometimes we human beings simply cannot step out of our own created reality to 'see ourselves as others see us'.

Probably just as well, in some cases. The shock would be shattering.

It must have been difficult for her to hand it back, & you have to wonder how she managed to justify that to herself.

 I hope all those affected by this will be properly compensated, preferably very soon.