Avast ye! The ol' cap'n o' Britain's Post Office be givin' up his noble title fer falsely accusin' countless postmasters, arr!
2024-01-09
Arr! The cap'n o' Britain's post office, she be givin' back her royal honor! Aye, the wrath be risin' o'er those poor souls wrongly blamed, makin' her walk the plank o' public fury.
The former head of Britain's Post Office, Paula Vennells, has announced that she will return her royal honor following outrage over a wrongful conviction scandal. This scandal involved hundreds of postmasters who were accused of theft due to a faulty computer system. The British government is now considering offering a mass amnesty to over 700 branch managers who were convicted of theft or fraud between 1999 and 2015. The true culprit was a defective accounting system called Horizon, supplied by Fujitsu. Vennells, who served as the CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, said she will give up her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) title in response to the mounting criticism. More than 1.2 million people have supported an online petition calling for her to be stripped of the honor.Vennells expressed her remorse for the devastation caused to the wrongly accused postmasters and their families. She also stated her commitment to cooperating with the ongoing public inquiry into the scandal. However, she will technically retain the CBE title until it is revoked by the Honors Forfeiture Committee, a step that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated he supports.
This scandal has been brewing for years, with the Post Office initially maintaining that the data from Horizon was reliable and blaming branch managers for dishonesty. Many postmasters faced financial ruin and imprisonment, and tragically, some took their own lives. The release of a TV docudrama last week, "Mr. Bates vs the Post Office," renewed public outrage and brought further attention to the plight of the wronged postal workers.
After years of campaigning, 39 convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021, citing serious issues with the reliability of Horizon and failures in investigation and disclosure by the Post Office. While 93 postmasters have had their convictions overturned, many others are still awaiting exoneration. A fraud investigation has been opened, but no arrests or criminal charges have been made thus far.