Gilded lives of the Post Office scandal bosses that prove penitence is only for the little people
The new ITV drama about the appalling hounding of innocent, hard-working staff has enraged the nation. Wait until you read what happened next . . .
The scandalous persecution of hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters, wrongly accused of theft, false accounting and fraud, and cruelly dragged through the courts, was brought to life in this week’s hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
It details the heartbreaking story of Britain’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice, which saw more than 700 innocent people convicted — of which 263 were imprisoned — and threw hundreds more into bankruptcy and financial ruin. At least four committed suicide.
The long struggle by victims seeking to show how a faulty computer system named horizon — rather than dishonest sub-postmasters — was to blame for cash going missing from Post Office tills was endlessly frustrated by the organisation’s senior staff.
The drama forensically examines how the Post Office chose to fight tooth and nail to prevent the truth from coming out, giving misleading information to Parliament, the public and at least one high Court judge in the process.
eventually it was ordered to pay nearly £60 million in compensation to 555 victims, while a public inquiry into the whole sorry business is now underway. But astronomical legal costs mean that hundreds of sub-postmasters remain out of pocket, while scores have died before receiving justice.
Yet while the sub-postmasters and their families’ lives were ruined, several prominent members of the Boss Class which ran the three institutions most responsible for the scandal — the Post Office, IT firm Fujitsu and her Majesty’s Government — went on to bigger and better things. here we look at how they’ve prospered . . .
1) THE SHAMED FORMER PRIEST
AS CHIEF executive of the Post Office from 2012, Paula Vennells presided over the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history, resulting in countless ruined lives, not only Post Office staff but their families. Along the way, she’s been accused of various appalling professional oversights, many of which are chronicled in the ITV drama, where she is played by The Crown star Lia Williams.
On her watch, the Post Office sought to bury the scandal, with Vennells not only obfuscating and giving misleading information to MPs, but also backing her organisation’s strategy of aggressively prosecuting innocent sub-postmasters using computer data it knew was flawed.
Vennells was, among other things, personally responsible for the sacking of second sight, a forensic accounting firm brought in to get to the bottom of the scandal, just days before it was due to publish its excoriating findings. she also sanctioned the combative legal strategy her organisation pursued against victims of the scandal who sought recompense.
For this, she was richly rewarded, earning £4.9 million including huge performance-related bonuses and a CBE to boot, during the seven years before she resigned in 2019. Months after she went, the high Court awarded £ 58 million in damages to 555 persecuted sub-postmasters.
That decision didn’t deter Vennells’s ambitions. Instead of retiring to her £2 million Grade II-listed farmhouse, she took up a string of lucrative high- status jobs. The Nhs made her chair of a large trust. The Cabinet Office gave her an advisory role. supermarket Morrisons gave her an £89,000-ayear non- executive directorship and home retailer Dunelm paid her £55,000 to join its board.
The Church of england, where Vennells served as a part-time priest, meanwhile decided to put her on the committee overseeing its ethical investments.
After the full extent of the scandal became public, she issued a series of grovelling apologies and quit the public roles. she’s still hanging on to that CBE, though.
2) THE MONEYBAGS TELEVISION BOSS
VENNELLS’s predecessor Adam Crozier prospered after the Blair government handed him the chief executive role at the Pos t Office in 2003.
Fo r seven years, until his departure in 2010, the former boss of the Football Association was Britain’s best-paid civil servant, sometimes earning more than £3 million a year in pay and bonuses — despite presiding over the closure of more than 7,000 Post Office branches.
Of course, Crozier’s reign also coincided with the wrongful conviction of scores of innocent sub-postmasters. Indeed, it was during his tenure that the Post Office began issuing aggressive denials to news organisations which had begun to question the reliability of the horizon system.
Oddly, however, he does not once feature in ITV’s drama. some wonder if that could be because of one salient fact: after quitting the Post Office he spent seven years as head of ITV and ITV studios.
The broadcaster denies a coverup, however. ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office tells the story of the Post Office scandal from the perspective of a select group of former subpostmasters who formed the Justice for sub-postmasters Alliance, led by Alan Bates,’ explains ITV. ‘Alan’s campaign for justice only began to make headway when Paula Vennells was promoted to chief executive, so that’s the relationship we dramatise.’
Crozier continues to be blessed with good fortune, judging by his recent CV. In 2021, he was appointed chairman of BT, on a basic salary of £700,000, and he’s also chair of market research firm Kantar. Other sinecures have included boardroom roles at Premier Inn owner Whitbread, clothing giant ASOS and Vue Cinemas.
Like all big jobs, they’ve brought spoils: in 2022, Crozier was able to bulldoze a new home, purchased on a private estate in surrey, to build a £5 million mansion.
3) THE NEW LABOUR GRANDEE
WHEN MPs began asking awkward questions about the horizon scandal, Post Office Chair Alice Perkins was called upon to allay their concerns.
A former civil servant who earned £100,000-a-year in the parttime job from 2011 to 2015, she knew plenty about telling politicians what they wanted to hear: her husband, with whom she has two grown-up children, happens to be Tony Blair’s former Foreign secretary Jack straw.
In May 2012, this New Labour grandee travelled to Post Office HQ to discuss the escalating scandal with two concerned Parliamentarians: James ( now Lord) Arbuthnot, and Oliver Letwin, then Minister of state for Government Policy. The crucial meeting, at which Paula Vennells was also present, mirrored several depicted in ITV’s drama (in which Arbuthnot is a prominent character) by turning into an exercise in bluster and obfuscation.
At one point, Perkins and her chief executive promised to be ‘open and transparent’ over the affair. At another, they reassured the MPs that horizon had the ‘full support’ of the National Federation Of subPostmasters.
A judge later pointed out that both claims were untrue. Arbuthnot and Letwin had been ‘entitled to expect accurate information’ at the meeting, he said, but ‘did not receive it’, describing the promise of transparency made by Perkins and Vennells as ‘not accurate’.
Oxford-educated Perkins, now 74, laughably claimed on her departure that the Post Office was ‘more capable and confident’ than when she’d joined. After leaving, this recipient of the Companion of the Order of the Bath took her talents to the BBC, where she enjoyed a non-executive directorship.
It wasn’t until April 2021 that she finally issued an apology for the ‘deep distress’ her stewardship of the Post Office had caused.
4) THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS
The man supp o s e d l y in charge of holding Paula Vennells to account as her reign unravelled was Tim Parker, a notorious private equity tycoon known as The Prince Of Darkness, who followed Alice Perkins as Chairman in 2015.
Parker, who owes his nickname to the gusto with which he tends to oversee job cuts, told the world he was attracted to the Post Office’s ‘strong social purpose’.
he claimed that he only needed to work a day and a half per week to turn around the outfit, which was running at a loss, and negotiated a £75,000 salary, which he later donated to charity.
The ‘social purpose’ wasn’t overly evident in 2017, however, when he supported his chief executive in fighting 555 former sub-postmasters through the courts, using the highly-aggressive legal strategy chronicled by ITV.
Parker, whose wealth is estimated at more than £200 million, is yet to express much in the way of regret over this grubby affair. But ugly headlines rarely faze him.
In the early 2000s he turned up at
motoring association The AA’s headquarters to announce mass redundancies in a shiny black Porsche 911. At heritage shoe company Clarks, he fired 5,000 employees. And in a stint running car mechanic giant Kwik Fit, he dispensed with 3,000 workers.
In 2021, he abandoned his chairmanship of the National Trust after members, furious at the ‘ woke’ agenda he’d allegedly brought to the charity, launched a hostile bid to replace him.
Since he left the Post Office in 2022, the cash has continued to roll in: Parker has chaired Samsonite, the upmarket luggage firm, where he dispensed with a third of the workforce, and served as an advisor to finance company CVC Capital Partners.
5) THE CONSERVATIVE BIG-WIG’S SPOUSE
MICHAEL KEEGAN was the UK Chief Executive and Chairman of Fujitsu, the firm behind the botched computer system that caused the entire problem, when the coverup was at its height.
A 2014 press release announcing his appointment hailed his 30 years of experience in the IT sector, telling readers that prior to joining the Japanese tech giant he’d held ‘senior roles at the Royal Mail Group/Post Office Limited’.
Times change, however, and these days Keegan, who is the husband of Rishi Sunak’s education secretary Gillian Keegan, runs a mile from any suggestion that he might bear any responsibility for the sub-postmaster scandal.
To that end, he’s publicly stressed that, during his time as CEO, he only made one decision related to Horizon, and that was to cancel a tender to provide a new version of the system to the Post Office.
Furthermore, Keegan has insisted he only ever had one conversation with Vennells, at which the affair was not discussed.
The ongoing inquiry into the scandal will tell us more about the role Fujitsu had to play and the culpability of its various executives. However, the Government has certainly taken Keegan at his word: in 2018, he was made a ‘ Crown representative’ of the Cabinet Office, working primarily with the Ministry of Defence.
He also sits on the advisory board of the Prince’s Trust and is a non- executive director of an IT firm called Centerprise, which in May won a £1 million contract linked (controversially, given his wife’s job) to the schools rebuilding programme.
6) THE ‘MISLED’ LIB DEM LEADER
SIR ED DAVEY’S journey to the leadership of Britain’ s third party began in 2010, when he was appointed Minister for Postal Affairs in the coalition government. In May that year, a letter landed on his desk from Alan Bates, the wrongly-convicted postmaster at the centre of ITV’s new TV series.
‘Many people have been sent to prison, lost businesses and homes and faced financial ruin by an organisation that will stop at nothing to keep the true facts behind its failing IT system from being exposed,’ it read. ‘In writing to you on behalf of the group, I am asking for a meeting where we can present our case to you.’
Davey wrote back, primly informing Bates that this staggering miscarriage of justice was ‘an operational and contractual matter’ for the Post Office. The future Lib Dem leader concluded: ‘I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose.’
Fast forward to 2017 and Bates led a group litigation against the Post Office. It responded by hiring attack-dog lawyers from City firm Herbert Smith Freehills to fight its corner. At this point, Davey makes a second ugly appearance in the scandal. For in June that year, he agreed to be taken on by Herbert Smith Freehills as a ‘consultant on political issues and policy analysis’, earning £5,000 a month, for six hours’ work — £833 an hour.
While Sir Ed never worked on the Horizon case, he continued to be paid by the law firm throughout the ill-fated proceedings, only relinquishing the role in 2022.
Asked about the affair this week, Davey said he regrets not doing more but claimed to have been ‘deeply misled’ by Post Office executives.
7) THE GRUESOME TWOSOME
PLAYED with sinister menace by Coronation Street’s Katherine Kelly in the ITV drama, Angela van den Bogerd was the Post Office director in charge of handling complaints about Horizon from 2010 onwards.
A key sidekick of Paula Vennells — they are described as the ‘gruesome twosome’ in the programme — she was responsible for much of the misery heaped on sub-postmasters, and in 2019 found herself on the end of a remarkable dressing down from High Court Judge Peter Fraser after giving evidence in her employer’s defence in a 2019 legal case.
In a 300-page judgment, Fraser vehemently criticised Van den Bogerd’s testimony, saying she had deliberately sought to pull the wool over his eyes. ‘ There were two specific matters where [she] did not give me frank evidence, and sought to obfuscate matters and mislead me,’ he wrote. Despite
being ‘ a very clever person’, she had an unfortunate ‘disregard for factual accuracy’, the judge concluded, adding that he would only accept that she was telling the truth if it was ‘clearly and incontrovertibly corroborated by contemporaneous documents’.
Following this withering verdict, Van den Bogerd clung onto her job, and six-figure salary, until May 2020. Shortly afterwards, in a display of comical ineptitude, the Welsh FA decided to offer this court-certified rotter a highly-paid job as its Head Of People.
Her appointment created such a stink that she was forced out within months.
8) THE MEGA-RICH CANADIAN DAME
MOYA GREENE was in charge of Royal Mail as Chief executive for eight years from 2010, earning a huge £11.5 million in the process.
Although the organisation, which delivers letters and parcels, is now separate from the Post Office, it formed part of the same empire for the first two years of her reign. The year before the Canadian executive arrived, 50 sub-postmasters had told their story for the first time in Computer Weekly magazine, a development chronicled by the ITV drama.
During the first months of her reign, Greene’s organisation then decided to proceed with the notorious prosecution of sub-postmistress Seema Misra, who was sent to prison for 15 months, despite being pregnant, after faulty Horizon data suggested that she had stolen £75,000.
Later, in 2011, ernst & young warned in an official audit report that weaknesses in the Horizon system could ‘lead to . . . unauthorised or erroneous transactions’. yet still the prosecutions were allowed to continue.
Greene’s failure to get to grips with the escalating scandal has been blamed by various commentators on her alleged obsession with separating Royal Mail from the Post Office in order to enable its subsequent privatisation.
Whatever the cause, she went on to be garlanded with honours, including being named Sunday Times Businessperson Of The year and Financial Times Person Of The year 2014. In 2018 she became a Dame and the following year she received her home country’s equivalent, the Order Of Canada.
Today, she sits on the advisory council of Oxford University’s Said Business School.