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FORMER Post Office boss Paula Vennells followed a “grossly improper” suggestion to not review all subpostmaster prosecutions after her communications chief said it would end up “front-page news,” the Horizon IT inquiry has heard.
Today, the inquiry was shown an email exchange between Ms Vennells and then director of communications Mark Davies in July 2013, in which she said she would “take your steer” after he said looking at all past cases would be “in media terms… very high profile.”
Ms Vennells agreed that, had the Post Office decided to review all prosecutions of false accounting, it “may well have” avoided the “lost decade” until miscarriages of justice involving subpostmasters were discovered.
She said she did not remember if she took the “advice of the PR guy” to review past prosecutions and conceded that the view of Mr Davies was a “grossly improper perspective.”
Ms Vennells was answering questions as part of her second day of evidence to the inquiry.
Hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon IT system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
