Staunton: PO CEO is under investigation

Hi

Hope you’re doing okay. I spent most of the week chugging around the country in my ageing Peugeot 5008 (I call it the Atomic Potato), filming things for ITV News.

I was able to catch most of Tuesday’s Business Select Committee evidence (watch it all here, read the transcripts here) by streaming the audio from the parliament TV website via my phone through my car stereo system. It certainly kept me awake on a very long journey.

Let’s start with recently-jettisoned Post Office chair Henry Staunton’s extraordinary revelations:

Staunton came across as an experienced, decent individual, if, perhaps, a little naive. I am sure the business world can be tough, but politics is brutal. Staunton had the “well, that happened” air of a man who had been chewed up and spat out by a government machine wholly indifferent to the concept of morality or truth.

Staunton described a boardroom at war. He told the committee that one of the first jobs of his tenure (which only lasted 13 months, remember) was to pacify a greedy Chief Executive.

Nick Read (who last year earned a basic salary of £415,000) wanted a pay rise, so Staunton went cap-in-hand on his behalf to the government, to try and squeeze some more cash out of them.

A bemused Business Secretary Grant Shapps sent Staunton away with a flea in his ear, apparently telling him “Don’t waste a postage stamp coming to talk to me about it.”

The complaint

Then Staunton confirmed he was indeed under investigation by the Post Office, but that was due to one paragraph alleging “politically incorrect comments” in an 80-page complaint “primarily” about Nick Read. This was presented in the form of a “speak up” document by the Post Office’s Director of HR.

The Director in question would likely be either Jane Davies (who lasted nine months from Dec 2022), or her replacement Karen McEwan (who succeeded Davies in Sep 2023). I’ve asked the Post Office for clarity on this and have not yet received a reply.

Staunton said Read had “fallen out” with his HR boss, and Staunton thought the 80 page dossier might be the HR woman “negotiating a better exit package.”

This was the first time the committee had heard about Read being under investigation. They also didn’t know he had threatened to resign both near the beginning of Staunton’s tenure (due to not earning enough money) and near the end (because of the HR director’s complaint against him).

Given that Read had, in the previous hour, been asked “Have you ever tried to resign as chief executive of the Post Office?”, to which, under oath, he replied “No”, this raises questions.

There is obviously a difference between “threatened” and “tried” and that difference may contain the answer to whether Read might be held in contempt of Parliament.

The committee chair, Liam Byrne, has written to Mr Read asking for an unredacted copy of the HR director’s dossier, which apparently details Read’s threats to resign.

More dysfunction

We haven’t even got to Staunton’s evaluation of his defenestration. Staunton strenuously rejected the idea it was because he tried to interfere in an investigation involving him (as alleged by Post Office director Bed Tidswell during his evidence session on Tuesday).

Instead he said his sacking came about because he was sticking up for Elliot Jacobs (pictured), one of the Postmaster board directors who had complained to Staunton that his views and the views of the other Subpostmaster director Saf Ismail were being ignored.

Jacobs was also under investigation by the Post Office for accounting discrepancies (file under you couldn’t make it up, etc).

According to Staunton, Jacobs felt the investigation was unwarranted and that it was being used by the Post Office General Counsel Ben Foat as an instrument to “control” the Postmaster directors. Staunton passed on his concerns to Read, who immediately sent them to Foat, an action Staunton described to MPs as “appalling”.

That resulted in an email from Jacobs to Read stating, among other things, that the idea Subpostmasters

“are “guilty” and “on the take” is embedded in this company… The investigations department is out of control… This business is supposed to be Postmaster centric – it isn’t… we continue to be ignored and seen by many as an annoyance and having us on the Board a necessary but unwanted addition.”

There’s so much more in there, including what seems to be a reference to the investigation team (Read’s “untouchables”), as “reds” (enemies?), ie:

“the “reds” are still employed, on a nice pension and bubbling their anti-postmaster beliefs around the business”.

Suspended Comms Director Richard Taylor leaves

If all that wasn’t enough, the Post Office will now be looking for a new Comms Director. The most recent incumbent, Richard Taylor (pictured), was caught on tape (twice) suggesting that no Horizon error had been found responsible for causing holes in Subpostmaster branch accounts and that many of the Subpostmaster campaigners were, in fact, thieves.

Taylor was suspended pending an investigation, which concluded with his departure from the Post Office. Yesterday, the Post Office stated on its website:

“The two private conversations were covertly recorded in 2020 and 2021. The conversations were one-to-one between Mr Taylor and a friend of forty years who instigated both meetings. While Mr Taylor’s comments did not breach any confidentiality, they do not reflect the view of the Post Office. Mr Taylor apologised publicly to anybody offended by his comments. Richard Taylor has left his role at Post Office, and hopes this might help to ensure that all those affected by the Horizon IT scandal, and the wider public, maintain confidence in the modernisation of Post Office.”

I’ve been in contact with the source who provided the audio tapes we broadcast on TalkTV. The source wrote:

“It was what [Taylor] said (twice) that damned him, not what I did. I think he probably got off lightly (with a pay off) rather than stay and be there for the inevitable eradication of the Post Office board of Directors.”

Personally speaking, it has been evident for a long time that the Post Office needs to evacuated and set on an orbit that will see it leave our solar system and crash harmlessly into the sun. But there is no political will to do this. Partly, I think, because none of the main parties can be bothered to expend resources on thinking about it. They have bigger fish to fry and consider the current arrangement the least worst option. For whom, though? The “reds”?

A date with Paula Vennells

The Inquiry has published provisional dates for the various evidence sessions in the now compounded Phases 5 and 6. Paula Vennells (pictured) will be in the chair (or dialled in remotely) for three days from Wed 22 May to Fri 24 May.

Our old friend Angela van den Bogerd (see “What Angela Did Next“) will be giving evidence on Thu 25 and Fri 26 April.

Mop and Bucket man Chris Aujard (former interim General Counsel) will be under oath on 24 April, and author of the Clarke Advices, Simon Clarke, will be giving evidence on Thu 2 May.

Alwen Lyons OBE, who told an untruth to Ian Henderson from Second Sight about remote access to Horizon (see my book), will be there on Tue 21 May.

There are many more characters you will no doubt want to hear from, all of whom are listed here. I am particularly interested in the mysterious Susan Crichton (Aujard’s predecessor) and former Post Office chair, Alice Perkins, both of whom ghosted away from the business during the cover-up period and who have not said a word in public about it since.

The inquiry has also just published all of the closing written statements to Phase 4. As neither Flora Page nor Ed Henry KC chose to make oral closing statements on behalf of their Subpostmaster clients, I am looking forward to reading their written statement first, before piling through the rest. Karl Flinders from Computer Weekly has already done so and published this piece today.

Alongside the closing statements is an admonition to the Post Office from the Inquiry Chair, Sir Wyn Williams, who expressed his surprise at the Post Office attempting to include expert opinion from a report they commissioned which the Chair had never agreed to admit into evidence.

I wonder how many thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money the Post Office hosed down the drain in that particular exercise. Plus ça change.

More Subpostmasters pass away without redress

Tom Witherow reports that the number of Subpostmasters who have died waiting for compensation is now more than 250. This, more than anything, makes the petty boardroom squabbling, arguments with the government and venal dysfunction within the Post Office seem even more squalid.

Tom has also compiled a rogues gallery entitled Who is to Blame for the Post Office Scandal and caught up with former Subpostmaster Francis Duff, who he first interviewed for the Daily Mail last year, putting rocket boosters under the compensation scandal. Francis is finally getting something close to the money he is due, but the feeling is bittersweet, for reasons explained in Tom’s article.

Finally, after Ian Henderson’s interview in The Times the other week, which publication do you think would carry a profile of Baron Arbuthnot of Edrom, direct descendent of James V of Scotland? Why, Tatler, of course. What a world.

Hello and goodbye

The warmest of welcomes to new subscribers who continue to find this newsletters through various means, and thanks again to everyone for their correspondence, including the people who want to talk to me about one of the Post Office’s pre-Horizon IT systems, Capture. I am sorry I have not yet been able to find the time to work on this area, but I will, hopefully, before my tenure at ITV News comes to an end.

I am currently engaged in formulating two or three non-Capture investigations of which I am hoping at least one will bear fruit (ie get televised) in the next couple of weeks.

I will try to put out another newsletter on either Friday or Saturday next week. In the meantime I will be haring about all over the place, pausing only to join the Bates v Post Office claimants’ independent Horizon IT expert Jason Coyne on stage at the Tech Show at the Excel in London’s Docklands on Wednesday afternoon. Tickets are free, but the registration process looks incredibly complicated. Maybe it’s a test. I hate IT.

Enjoy the weekend!

Nick