PAULA VENNELLS DELIBERATELY DECIDED AGAINST REVIEW – Former post office boss wanted to ‘manage the media’ 

A set of emails between Ms Paula Vennells and her head of communications, Mark Davies discussing a potential review of cases in those wrongly prosecuted showed Ms Vennells saying the “most urgent” objective was to “manage the media”.

At the time of the decision not to launch the review in July 2013, Ms Vennells knew that Gareth Jenkins, an engineer at Fujitsu who designed the Horizon system, had withheld information from court about bugs in the network.

The public inquiry saw the emails exchanged between Ms Vennells and Mr Davies after she had received a critical independent report by Second Sight, a fraud investigation firm, into the claims of Post Office branch operators.

Ms Vennells denied that her decision not to review the many miscarriages of justice had been led by her public relations adviser.After breaking down in tears on the opening day of the inquiry, Ms Vennells repeatedly told the inquiry that she could not recollect events.

Ms Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, which included the last few years of the scandal.

Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted after faults in the Horizon accounting system said money was missing from Post Office branch accounts.