THE PREACHER

NAME: Paula Vennells AGE: 61 ROLE: Former chief executive TENURE: 2012-2019 POST OFFICE EARNINGS: £4.9m

THE priest and mother of two sons joined the Post Office as network director in 2007 before becoming chief executive in 2012.

By the time she left in 2019, there had been a disastrous High Court battle against subpostmasters and a series of missed chances to sort out the problem.

She landed plum jobs as chairman of he Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and adviser to the Cabinet Office.

Mrs Vennells was also made a CBE for ‘services to charity and the Post Office’.

As a non-executive director at supermarket giant Morrisons, she is paid £89,000-ayear for two or three meetings a month.

In September 2019 she was appointed director of homeware retailer Dunelm – adding another £51,000-a-year.

She lives in a plush detached house near Kempston, Bedfordshire. with husband John, 64, who was a director of a chemical engineering consultancy.

Mrs Vennells came from what she described as ‘working class Manchester’ with a father who worked at an engineering firm and a bookkeeper mother.

She excelled at the private Manchester High School for Girls and went on to read Russian and French at Bradford University. After a stint as an interpreter, she embarked on a business career with stints at Unilever, Whitbread, L’Oréal, Dixons and Argos before joining the Post Office in 2007.

She said it appealed to her sense of public duty and gave her an opportunity to ‘give back’. Mrs Vennells waxed lyrical about how her Christian faith was a driving force.

Despite the sub-postmasters scandal, she has won some plaudits for modernising branches and bringing the Post Office back into profit from heavy losses, reducing its reliance on the taxpayer.

But her record on the scandal threatens to overshadow all that. On her watch, former sub-postmaster Martin Griffiths, 59, took his life while being hounded for money by the Post Office.

And the prosecutions continued right up until 2015 – long after widespread doubts about the guilt of staff had surfaced. The pursuit of her own workers persisted throughout her reign despite a mounting body of evidence that the IT system was flawed. In 2011 an official audit report by Ernst and Young, which was sent to Post Office directors, said it ‘has again identified weaknesses’ in the Horizon IT system.

The Post Office did set up a mediation scheme in 2013 to try to make amends, but it failed and MPs labelled it a ‘sham’.

Then independent investigators, hired in the same year, found ‘phantom’ losses could have been caused by the IT system.

However, two years later Mrs Vennells told a committee of MPs she continued to ‘have confidence in the Horizon system’.

And in 2017 she approved the decision to fight sub-postmasters who claimed they had been wrongly accused in the High Court. After a series of defeats, her successor settled for £58million last December.

Tory peer Lord Arbuthnot, who has campaigned in Parliament on behalf of sub-postmasters for several years, said the whole Post Office board should take responsibility but ‘it starts with Paula Vennells’.

There have been some consequences for her. In 2018-19 her bonus was cut by £35,000 to £179,000 because of the litigation and its impact on the business. She was dumped from the Cabinet Office in March and ministers have written to the NHS watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, to ask if she is a ‘fit and proper’ person to head five hospitals.

It took until December 2019 before she apologised.

But for Mr Griffiths’ sister, Jayne Caveen, this was ‘too little too late’.

In response Mrs Vennells said: ‘It was and remains a source of great regret to me that these colleagues and their families were affected over so many years.

‘I am truly sorry we were unable to find both a solution and a resolution outside of litigation and for the distress this caused.’