This week, Paula Vennells, the ex-chief of the Post Office announced she was stepping down from the boards of and two of the UK’s biggest retailers – supermarket Morrisons and home and leisure retailer, Dunelm.
It comes within the same week that the UK High Court cleared the names of 39 post office workers all falsely accused of accounting fraud and theft. This is in addition to 6 other convictions in December 2020.
More people have been affected in the ‘Post Office Scandal’ than in any other miscarriage of justice in the UK. Many of those impacted lost their homes, life savings, credit rating and livelihoods. Some had no choice but to file for bankruptcy, others were sent to prison and sadly it is reported that Mark Griffiths, a post office worker accused of stealing £60,000, took his own life in 2013.
Prior to taking the role at the Post Office, Vennells had worked at brands including L’Oreal, Dixons, Argos and Unilever. She joined the Post Office in 2007, working up to the role as Chief Executive in 2012. She left in 2019 walking away with £4.5million in pay and bonuses, taking up a variety of non-executive and Chair roles, including those within retail.
Andrew Higginson, Morrisons chairman, said Vennells had been an “insightful, effective and hardworking” non-executive director in a position she took up in 2016.
Similarly, Andy Harrison, chairman of Dunelm is quoted as saying: “We respect Paula’s decision to step down from the board and I would like to thank her for the positive contribution she has made to the business since her appointment in September 2019.”
News stories and documentaries about the Post Office scandal have been prevalent since 2011, and BBC investigative journalist Nick Wallis has spent the last ten years reporting on the matter, including with a BBC Panorama documentary in 2015. Vennells joined both Dunelm and Morrisons whilst the story was at large in the UK, and has maintained her position at both right up until this week.
When the Horizon project was launched by the Post Office working with Fujitsu in 1999, it was paraded as “the largest non-military IT system in Europe”. Yet the rollout across the Post Office network proved to be significantly flawed, resulting in one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.
Despite a…
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