Finally stripped of CBE, Post Office boss in IT scandal
DISGRACED former Post Office chief Paula Vennells was yesterday stripped of her CBE by the King for ‘ bringing the honours system into disrepute’.
Her humiliation came as analysis revealed 251 postmasters wrongly accused of theft have died before seeing justice.
A petition calling for the CBE to be taken from Ms Vennells, 65, attracted 1.2million signatures, The Post Office chief executive from 2012 to 2019 was given the honour in December 2018 despite a legal action by 555 subpostmasters beginning in 2017.
The Post Office prosecuted more than 800 postmasters for theft, despite ever-growing evidence, confirmed four years ago, that its Horizon computer system could be to blame for holes in accounts.
Even after public anger finally stirred official action following last month’s TV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, some 1,900 affected by the scandal have still to be properly compensated.
Convicted postmasters are now dying at the rate of three a week, according to a Times newspaper tally of the dead, before full compensation and exoneration is arranged. There have been four known suicides of postmasters, with the rest dying before the allegedly bureaucratic compensation process has been resolved.
Solicitor Neil Hudgell, who represents hundreds of postmasters seeking payouts, said: ‘There’s no rational explanation to why it takes up to five months to get a response to routine correspondence. What keeps me up at night is the clients who are going to die before they get compensation.’
Only a seventh of even the limited compensation budget set so far has been paid out, with just 41 fully compensated so far.
Recently- sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton has alleged he was advised to delay making full payments so the Government could ‘limp’ into the election without too big a bill – a claim angrily denied by ministers.
The Government has announced a Bill which will by July fully exonerate 800 postmasters over wrongful prosecutions – with a minimum of £600,000 compensation each, said to be due this year. However, it has emerged that last month Post Office chief executive Nick Read wrote to Justice Secretary Alex Chalk saying he would be ‘ bound to oppose’ exoneration appeals for at least 369 of the prosecuted postmasters.
The Post Office argued that at least the 369 were proven guilty without tainted evidence from Fujitsu’s Horizon system, which first fell under suspicion 15 years ago. A Government spokesman has said it will stop ‘anyone rightly convicted... from taking advantage of the compensation’.
‘I fear my clients are going to die’