SHAME ON PAULA VENNELLS Paula Vennells cried at the inquiry. Read her emails before you feel sorry for her. Paula Vennells ran the @PostOffice from 2012 to 2019. Its computer system, Horizon, showed money missing from branches when none was missing. More than 900 postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015. Some went to prison. Families lost homes, savings and reputations. The inquiry @PostOffInquiry says at least 13 people are thought to have taken their own lives because of the scandal. Now look at what was happening at the top. In July 2013 Paula Vennells asked her husband for a less emotional word than bugs. He suggested exception or anomaly. The inquiry's lawyer called it Orwellian. In August 2013 she wrote that the hope of the mediation scheme for postmasters was to avoid or minimise compensation. At the inquiry she agreed it was possibly her hope. After a row with her top lawyer, Susan Crichton, Paula Vennells wrote that Susan Crichton was possibly more loyal to her professional rules and put her integrity as a lawyer above the interests of the business. A lawyer with integrity. Terrible for business. In September 2013 Paula Vennells asked for a Horizon risk reference to be removed from the Royal Mail @RoyalMail share sale prospectus, then told the Post Office chair she had earned her keep. Around the same time postmaster Martin Griffiths attempted suicide. Paula Vennells emailed that such cases usually have several contributory factors. Martin Griffiths died 3 weeks later. Former general counsel Chris Aujard told the inquiry that in November 2013 the executive team favoured ending prosecutions and Paula Vennells interjected that the Post Office should keep taking some. His notes recorded reluctance to stop because prosecutions acted as a deterrent. Prosecutions carried on for another 2 years. In December 2014 a @BBC One Show film showed postmasters fighting to clear their names. Paula Vennells wrote that Jo Hamilton lacked passion and that the rest of the film was hype and human interest. She told colleagues she was more bored than outraged. Jo Hamilton had been accused of stealing £36K. Her conviction was quashed in 2021. In February 2015 Paula Vennells told MPs the Post Office had won every Horizon case in court. In 2024 she admitted that was false and said it was unintentional. In March 2015 she wrote to Post Office minister Jo Swinson that there was no reason to conclude any prosecution was unsafe. Jo Swinson later said the letter misled her. @guardian reported she collected more than £4.5M in pay and bonuses as chief executive. She was given a CBE for services to the Post Office and charity while 555 postmasters were suing the Post Office. She left the Post Office during that court case. From April 2019 she chaired Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (@imperialNHS) for £60K a year. A document shown to the inquiry says the government shareholder asked in 2014 whether she was still the right person to lead, citing lack of knowledge. Lesley Sewell, her former head of IT, told the inquiry that Paula Vennells contacted her 4 times in 2020 and 2021, hoping preparation might help avoid an independent inquiry. Lesley Sewell blocked her number. In January 2024 Dame Moya Greene, former Royal Mail chief executive, told Paula Vennells she thought she knew and could no longer support her. Paula Vennells denied it. Then came May 2024. 3 days at the public inquiry. 775 page witness statement. 7 months to prepare it. Tears. Apologies. She said she had been too trusting. She said information had been kept from her. She named 5 former executives as having let her down. She apologised to Jo Hamilton for being rude in her email. The inquiry lawyer asked if she was the unluckiest CEO in the UK. Unlucky.. is one word for it. There is another way to look at the record. A CEO who wrote that mediation was meant to avoid or minimise compensation. A CEO who told MPs something she later admitted was false. A CEO who wrote to a minister that she saw no reason to conclude any prosecution was unsafe. A CEO who collected a reported £4.5M while postmasters lost everything. A CEO who later told the inquiry she had been too trusting. More than 1.2M people signed a petition for her to lose the CBE. The King forfeited it on 23 February 2024. As far as I can find, nobody at the top has been charged and nobody has reported her repaying a bonus. The final inquiry report is not out yet. Police are still investigating. Jo Hamilton, the woman Paula Vennells wrote off as lacking passion, said afterwards she is in two minds on whether the apology was genuine or came from being so publicly ashamed. The emails are public. Read them. Then decide who in this story deserves your sympathy. Share this. Postmasters were ignored for years while the people above them were paid, decorated and given new jobs. Sources @itvnews @DailyMail @ComputerWeekly @Independent @PostOffInquiry

LAW FIRM THAT DESTROYED TRACY MCFADDEN'S CASE ALSO PAID ED DAVEY 60,000 POUNDS A YEAR Tracy McFadden ran a shop and post office in Sandiacre Derbyshire for 14 years. She put 250k pounds of her own money into building it in 2002. Business was going so well she was planning to expand. Then the Horizon system flagged a discrepancy and her life fell apart. Tracy McFadden did the responsible thing. She called the Horizon helpline for help. The debt magically doubled to 2,000 pounds overnight. Then it kept climbing. 4,000. Then 16,000. Tracy had no way to check the system herself because she was never given proper access to it. She was told to accept the debt or lose the right to trade. So she accepted a debt that never existed just to keep her doors open. She only escaped a criminal prosecution because witnesses vouched for her, including the wife of a regional Post Office manager. Her contract was terminated in 2014. The business was gone. The reputation was gone. Tracy McFadden went from running a thriving shop to what she describes as begging for benefits. Now here is the SHOCKING part. This was never just a broken piece of software. It was a chain of people who knew and chose their careers over the truth. Post Office executives signed off on prosecutions built on a system riddled with bugs. Fujitsu built that system and stayed quiet for years while it destroyed lives. Ed Davey was postal affairs minister from 2010 to 2012 while all of this was unfolding. When campaigner Alan Bates asked him to meet about serious concerns with Horizon, Ed Davey told him a meeting would not serve any purpose. Years later Ed Davey took a paid consultancy with Herbert Smith Freehills, the very law firm hired by the Post Office to fight the sub postmasters in court, earning 275k pounds for his time there. His brother Henry Davey was a corporate partner at the same firm. What a coincidence. Tracy McFadden was one of 555 claimants in the group litigation against the Post Office. They won. Technically. Legal costs swallowed most of the settlement before the victims ever saw a penny of it. A computer did not do this to Tracy McFadden. People did. People who had every chance to stop it and chose their fees and their careers instead. SOURCES @BBCNews @itvnews @ComputerWeekly @nickwallis

Janine Powell ran a Post Office branch in Tiverton, Devon. In 2007 @PostOffice bosses accused her of stealing £74,000. Their own courts later found the Post Office knew its Horizon system had bugs from the earliest days of its operation. They prosecuted her anyway. Post Office lawyers offered her a deal, plead guilty to false accounting and they would drop the theft charge. She said no, she wasn't pleading guilty to something she hadn't done. So they took her to trial in Exeter in 2008 and got their conviction. The judge gave her 18 months. She walked into prison two days after her daughter's 10th birthday. She served five months behind bars, then three more wearing an electronic tag. She left three children behind, aged 10 to 18, in the care of friends because their mother was in a cell instead of at home. She came out with a criminal record that made her unemployable, a hometown she felt too ashamed to walk through, and depression that pushed her toward suicide. This was never a rogue glitch nobody noticed. The Court of Appeal later ruled the Post Office "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "steamrolled over" any subpostmaster who challenged it, calling the prosecutions an affront to the conscience of the court. Post Office lawyers hid evidence of Horizon's faults from courts, prosecutors and defence teams, to protect the organisation at all costs. Powell's conviction was quashed in 2022, one of hundreds overturned in what is now Britain's widest miscarriage of justice. More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 by an organisation that knew its own evidence was rotten and used it anyway. Janine Powell has given evidence to the ongoing public inquiry. More than 45 people connected to the scandal are now under criminal investigation. Still, nobody who signed off on her prosecution has spent a night in the cell they sent her to. SOURCES @BBCNews @itvnews @nickwallis

IS THE POST OFFICE WAITING FOR BETTY BROWN TO DIE BEFORE IT PAYS UP?? Betty Brown ran the Annfield Plain Post Office in County Durham with her husband Oswall from 1985 to 2003. Good business. Nice customers. No problems. Then Horizon arrived in 2000, built by Fujitsu @fujitsu_uk, and the till started lying. First night it was £500 short. Within weeks it was £1,500 to £1,600 a week, every week. Betty and Oswall paid every shortfall out of their own pocket because the alternative was being branded a thief. They handed over more than £50,000. Betty says the real figure was closer to £100,000. That was their retirement money, poured into a hole created by software nobody at the @PostOffice bothered to question. Betty was never prosecuted. Small mercy. Instead a manager decided she was too old for the job and needed replacing with someone who understood the technology. She was pushed out in 2003. Oswall died a year later. Betty believes the stress helped kill him, and says his dying thoughts were about whether the Post Office had finally been in touch. She spent the next two decades fighting for compensation while the people who built and defended a broken system kept their salaries, their bonuses and their pensions. In 2025, aged 92, Betty finally settled her claim. In 2026 she received an OBE from King Charles at Windsor Castle. She used the moment to tell him that money does not equal justice, and asked him to pass that on to the Prime Minister. She still had not received a single penny of her settlement by the time she collected the medal. That is the British state's idea of closure. Ruin someone for over two decades then hand them a piece of metal before the cheque clears. Betty says every subpostmaster caught up in the Horizon scandal deserves the same recognition she got. She is right. None of them asked for a medal. They asked for their money and their names back. SOURCES @BBCNews @itvnews @ComputerWeekly @nickwallis @Karlfl

PARMOD KALIA IS DEAD He died on 13 March 2026, aged 67, still waiting for the full compensation he was owed. Owed for a crime he never committed. Parmod Kalia ran a Post Office branch in Orpington for 11 years. Clean record, steady business, nothing unusual. Then Horizon showed up and decided he owed £22,000 he never took. He was accused of theft in 2001. Investigators got a confession out of him. He said later it was signed in fear, not guilt. He pleaded guilty because that is what people do when the system makes resistance cost more than surrender. He got 6 months in prison. It took until 2021 for Southwark Crown Court to quash the conviction. @PostOffice didn't even oppose the appeal. Twenty years to undo what one honest look at the evidence should have caught in a week. Through all of it Kalia worked as a foster carer, giving stability to vulnerable children while carrying a criminal record he was too ashamed to mention to the people closest to him. His friend Tim Brentnall said he brought calmness and warmth to whatever room he walked into. Funny how the system managed the opposite for him. Then came the cancer diagnosis. He told ITV News he was taking it one day at a time, hoping his final redress payment might arrive before he ran out of days. It didn't arrive in time. He was one of more than 4,300 subpostmasters still waiting on full and final compensation when he died. Post Office said if there had been retrials there was still a reasonable prospect of conviction, so Kalia wasn't owed full compensation for malicious prosecution. Read that twice. A wrongly convicted, terminally ill man was told the theoretical odds still weren't fully in his favour, so the payment could wait. Meanwhile MPs pointed out that Fujitsu @Fujitsu_UK still hasn't contributed a single penny to the nearly £1.5 billion redress bill for a scandal it built and sold to the Post Office. Not one penny. They can engineer software that jails hundreds of innocent people but apparently a bank transfer is beyond their technical capability. More than 700 branch managers were convicted between 1999 and 2015 because of Horizon's fictional shortfalls. Only a fraction have full settlements. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry keeps recording the names of people who died waiting. Kalia is just the latest entry on a list that should never have existed. He wasn't asking for a favour. He was asking for what he was owed, for a crime he never committed, from a system that has known it was broken for over a decade. SOURCES @BBCNews @ITVNews @ComputerWeekly @PostOffInquiry

BULLY BOYS IN BLACK SUITS Chris Dawson ran a thriving Post Office branch in Pitlochry, Perthshire, plus a smaller one in Kinloch Rannoch and an attached toy and gift shop. Then in 2010 an auditor turned up, the Horizon system flagged a £17,500 shortfall, and his life ended that day even though nobody told him yet. Two men in black suits interrogated him in his own home while his wife and kids sat upstairs. He called them bully boys. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry heard how there was an automatic presumption of guilt before a single fact was checked. He was offered a deal. Plead guilty to theft and they would drop the fraud charge. He said no, because he had not stolen anything, because nobody had. He was suspended for six months on no pay. Within months the mortgage was gone. Within months the marriage was gone too. He said he does not believe any marriage could survive that kind of pressure, and he is right, because marriages are not built to survive being audited by a computer glitch. He was never prosecuted. That is meant to sound like good news. It is not. He still lost the business, the home, the car, and was declared bankrupt. Pitlochry is a small cash handling town and everyone knew he was under suspicion. He said it made him unemployable. Nobody hires the guy the town thinks robbed the Post Office, even when the Post Office quietly knew the £17,500 was never actually missing. He ended up washing dishes to survive. He battled depression through what he calls 14 years of hell on earth. He rebuilt his life from nothing, working as a carer for vulnerable elderly people, the very people who never got the memo that dignity is optional once an algorithm decides you are a thief. In 2022 he gave evidence in Glasgow and wept in front of the inquiry. He asked to see former chief executive Paula Vennells and other senior officials face the full weight of the law, the same weight that was so eagerly dropped on him for a crime that never happened. He was 48 years old when he said it. He should never have had to. Another subpostmaster, another stolen decade, another institution that never once said sorry until a TV drama forced the country to look. SOURCES @BBCScotlandNews @STVNews @thecourieruk @PostOffInquiry