A former HR director at the Post Office, whose misconduct claims against chief executive Nick Read were dismissed following an internal investigation, has written to MPs in a bid to plead her case.

Jane Davies, who was in post for seven months from December 2022 until she was dismissed, claimed Mr Read led a “deliberate campaign to defame and ostracise me” after she failed to secure him a satisfactory pay rise.

In the March-dated letter released by the business and trade committee on Tuesday, Ms Davies said she spent the first eight weeks in her role as group chief people officer dealing with Mr Read’s “pay demands”.

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He has previously denied an allegation by sacked Post Office chairman Henry Staunton that he had threatened to resign numerous times on the pay issue.

Ms Davies said she was writing to the committee in support of Mr Staunton’s version of events in his evidence to the committee in February.

“He [Mr Read] regarded the final offer of 5% increase as insulting,” she wrote.

“As a result, he regarded me as a failure for not getting the remuneration increase. What followed was a deliberate campaign to defame and ostracise me.

“From my perspective, his charm had been replaced by someone who was not authentic or honest and importantly who lacked genuine concern or care for others, employees, hard-working postmasters and those that had been wronged.

“The role that I was being asked to do, looked nothing like the role that had been sold to me when I was recruited. It was clear that cultural change that needed to start with the senior leaders, was simply not high on Nick Read’s agenda.”

The Post Office announced last week that its chief executive had been “exonerated of all misconduct allegations” following an independent review into the bullying allegations.

The issue has proved to be a further thorn in the organisation’s side as it faces a public inquiry over the handling of the Horizon IT scandal that saw hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly convicted of theft and fraud.

At the same time, the government has moved to speed up redress for all those failed.

Mr Staunton, who also wrote to the committee in correspondence that was released on Tuesday, expressed concerns over a “lack of clarity around the investigation” into Mr Read’s conduct.

The former Post Office chair, who was sacked by the government in January, was also the subject of a complaint raised by a whistleblower that he said related to an alleged use of politically incorrect and potentially offensive language.

“The implications of the allegations, namely that I am racist and misogynistic, are ones that are deeply distressing, would be contested by everyone who knows me, and are definitely not borne out by my behaviour as a champion of diversity in all the organisations I have worked for, including the Post Office”, Mr Staunton wrote.

“It is not clear to me how these allegations became incorporated into an investigation which was prompted by a whistleblower complaint about alleged bullying by the chief executive, particularly as the complaint was directed at no-one else, and did not mention me by name.”

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The business and trade committee issued no comment when it released the contents of the letters.

A Post Office spokesperson responded: “Just last week a highly reputable barrister produced an extensive, robust, and impartial report that fully exonerated Nick Read of all the misconduct allegations levelled against him, and in so doing discredited many of the claims raised in these letters.

“For the avoidance of doubt, the barrister was fully empowered to investigate and conclude as she saw fit.

“Our focus remains on providing redress for postmasters; learning from the grievous errors of the past; and building an organisation able to meet the challenges of the future.”

Doubts have been raised over the government’s ability to unveil tax cuts ahead of the next general election after official figures revealed borrowing was higher than expected in the past year.

The Treasury borrowed £120.7bn in the financial year ending March 2024 – down £7.6bn from the year before, according to provisional estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, the figure is £6.6bn more than forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) only a month ago.

Overall, government debt was around 98.3% of the UK’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) in March – up 2.6 percentage points from the previous year and at levels not seen since the early 1960s.

Ruth Gregory, an economist from Capital Economics, said: “If the chancellor was hoping March’s figures would provide more scope for tax cuts at a fiscal event later this year, he will have been disappointed.

“Just based on the larger-than-expected 2023/24 budget deficit and the recent shift up in market interest rates, he may have even less fiscal ‘headroom’ (perhaps about £5bn) for tax cuts than the £8.9bn left over in March.”

Rob Wood, from Pantheon Macroeconomics, said he still expected the chancellor to cut taxes, but warned it would leave a financial headache for the Treasury after the next election, which is expected in the autumn.

He said: “[Jeremy] Hunt can plan for another year of unrealistically weak public spending to generate ‘headroom’ against his fiscal rules and thereby manufacture the funds to cut taxes.

“The next government will, therefore, face a tricky choice between raising taxes to fix creaking public services or holding the line on the chancellor’s recent tax cuts.”

Mr Hunt cut national insurance by 2p in the budget earlier this year and has said he would like to reduce taxes further.

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Jessica Barnaby, the ONS’s deputy director for public sector finances, said: “Spending was up about £58bn, with increased spending on public services and benefits outstripping large reductions in interest payable and energy support scheme costs. But with public sector income up £66bn, overall, the deficit still fell.

“At the end of the financial year, debt remained close to the annual value of the output of the economy, at levels last seen in the early 1960s.”

The figures also revealed that benefit payments increased by £36.9bn to £291.4bn during the year, amid inflation-linked increases and extra cost of living support.

Central government wages rose by £21bn, including health and education, but inflation-linked debt fell 27% to £78.3bn.

Receipts from inheritance tax also climbed to a record high of nearly £7.5bn.

A spokesperson for the Treasury said: “Debt increased in recent years because we rightly protected millions of jobs during COVID and paid half of people’s energy bills after [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sent bills skyrocketing.

“We can’t leave future generations to pick up the tab, so we must stick to the plan to get debt falling. And with inflation falling and wages rising – we have been able to cut national insurance by a third, which shows our determination to end the double taxation of work”.

Investors in Getir, the grocery delivery app which at one point attained a valuation of almost £10bn, are to inject yet more money into the company to fund its exit from the UK and Europe.

Sky News has learnt that shareholders in the company have drawn up provisional plans to commit tens of millions of pounds more into Getir in the coming weeks, even as its retrenchment poses a threat to thousands of jobs.

Sources close to the situation said that leading investors, who include Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi state-backed fund, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, were understood to have agreed to the new funding plan in recent days.

It will add to the more than $2bn Getir has already raised, making it one of the world’s most handsomely backed fast-delivery platforms.

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An announcement from Getir – which means ‘to bring’ in Turkish – is expected imminently, bringing the curtain down on an ill-fated breakneck expansion into Europe.

Its operations in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands are all expected to be shut, with discussions ongoing about the fate of its Fresh Direct arm in the US, which it only acquired a few months ago.

The restructuring will leave Getir as a business focused on its domestic Turkish market, with the company planning to focus largely on its food delivery operations there.

Its new funding from shareholders would cover the cost of exiting the three markets in Europe, as well as providing additional capital to invest in the Turkish business, according to insiders.

An announcement could come this week, although people close to the company cautioned that the exact timing had yet to be finalised.

The valuation at which the new money is being injected was unclear on Tuesday.

Its withdrawal from the UK is likely to put about 1,500 jobs at risk, Sky News revealed last week.

The company was valued at nearly $12bn just a couple of years ago amid booming demand for services provided by Getir and rivals like GoPuff, DoorDash and Deliveroo.

Getir, which has a multimillion-pound commercial partnership with the Premier League’s Tottenham Hotspur, said it did not comment on “market rumours”.

It has previously denied that any form of insolvency was on the cards for the group or its subsidiaries.

The company is understood to have drafted in restructuring advisers in recent days, while Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi fund that is one of its biggest shareholders, is being advised by AlixPartners.

It has already pulled out of a number of countries, including Italy and Spain, in an attempt to reduce losses.

Its retreat highlights the slumping valuations of technology companies once-hailed as the new titans of food retailing.

Founded in 2015, Getir was one of the hottest start-ups of the pandemic, when financiers rushed to plough billions of dollars into businesses they believed would benefit from structural shifts in the economy.

It raised more than $750m in a funding round in early 2022, but has seen its valuation slump since then.

Last September, Getir also announced a sharp cut in the size of its workforce, axeing roughly 2,500 jobs, or about 10% of its global employee base.

Many of its rivals have already gone bust, while others have been swallowed up as part of a desperate wave of consolidation.

Getir itself bought Gorillas in a $1.2bn stock-based deal that closed in December 2022.