The former head of Britain’s Post Office Paula Vennells has broken down in tears on several occasions while giving evidence to an inquiry into one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice that saw hundreds of branch managers wrongly convicted of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system
Vennells, who earlier this year gave back her Commander of the Order of the British Empire title that she received in 2019, admitted that she had “made mistakes” but denied there was a conspiracy to cover up the scandal.
“I have no sense that there was any conspiracy at all,” she said. “My deep sorrow in this is that I think that individuals, myself included, made mistakes, they didn’t see things and hear things.”
After the Post Office introduced the Horizon information technology system 25 years ago to automate sales accounting, local managers began finding unexplained losses that bosses said they were responsible for covering.