Who is Paula Vennells – the former Post Office boss one million people want stripped of her CBE?

Published

1 year ago

January 8, 2024

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More than a million people are calling for the former head of the Post Office to be stripped of her CBE over the Horizon IT scandal.

The story of more than 700 sub-postmasters and mistresses who were taken to court, left bankrupt, or imprisoned because of a computer system error has been retold in a new ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.

A public inquiry into the scandal, which wrongly accused hundreds of innocent workers of theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2015, is still ongoing, with only 93 convictions overturned so far.

As the TV series has grown in popularity, so has a petition to remove the then Post Office chief executive’s CBE.

Businesswoman and part-time priest

Paula Vennells joined the Post Office as group network director in 2007 having begun her business career at Unilever in 1981, later securing management positions at L’Oreal, Dixons, Argos and Whitbread.

Before that, she had grown up in Manchester and studied French and Russian at Bradford University.

Between 2002 and 2005 she trained as a Church of England deacon and was ordained as a priest in 2006. Alongside her career, she served at three churches in Bedfordshire.

Ms Vennells was promoted to Post Office chief executive in 2012 – the same year it split from Royal Mail.

During her tenure, she oversaw huge financial struggles, which forced the closure of thousands of branches nationwide and forced the service to modernise.

From 2000 the Post Office pursued criminal prosecutions against many of its staff over account shortfalls.

The sub-postmasters and mistresses involved protested their innocence from the beginning, but many were convicted and imprisoned, with their reputations left ruined.

The year in which Ms Vennells took charge of the Post Office, it bowed to mounting pressure to investigate the allegations being made about the IT system by several sub-postmasters.

It commissioned the private investigation company Second Sight to file a report, which ultimately concluded there were no widespread accounting or IT issues.

In 2017 a group of staff managed to bring their case against the Post Office to the High Court.

As it progressed, Ms Vennells faced increasing criticism, and she eventually stepped down from her role in 2019.

In the New Years Honours List at the beginning of that year, she had been given a CBE “for services to the Post Office and to charity”.

‘Truly sorry’

In December 2019, the case concluded, with Mr Justice Fraser ruling the sub-postmasters should have their convictions quashed and that the Horizon system was to blame for the scandal.

Mr Fraser described the Post Office’s evidence in the case as “institutional obstinacy”.

Following the ruling, Ms Vennells said: “I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to the 39 subpostmasters as a result of their convictions which were overturned last week.”

Soon after she reportedly agreed to cease her duties as an associate minister. The Bishop of St Albans, whose father was a sub-postmaster, was quoted saying it was the “right” decision.

She also stepped aside from non-executive leadership roles at Morrisons and Dunelm, according to reports.

After leaving the Post Office in 2019, Ms Vennells became chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

But the following year, with the Post Office appealing the High Court ruling, healthcare regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC) expressed concerns over Ms Vennells keeping her position, and it was announced she was stepping down for personal reasons in December 2020.

Amid an increasing backlash, Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot who led the campaign in parliament on behalf of the sub-postmasters and mistresses, said: “The hallmark of Paula Vennells’ time as CEO was that she was willing to accept appalling advice from people in her management and legal teams.

“The consequences of this were far-reaching for the Post Office and devastating for the sub-postmasters. However, there seem to have been no consequences for her.”

Mr Fraser’s original ruling was upheld in 2021 and a statutory public inquiry into the Horizon scandal began in 2022.

The Metropolitan Police has also confirmed it is investigating the Post Office over potential fraud offences related to the scandal.

Politics

‘Hawk tuah girl’ Haliey Welch says FBI probed her ‘memecoin disaster’

Published

2 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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‘Hawk tuah girl’ Haliey Welch says FBI probed her ‘memecoin disaster’

Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk tuah girl,” says the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefly probed her after her “memecoin disaster” — the failed launch of a token in her image that she promoted.

Welch said in a May 21 episode of her “Talk Tuah” podcast that the FBI showed up at her grandmother’s house looking to speak to her over the Hawk Tuah (HAWK) crypto token, which many crypto commentators have called an exit scam.

“After the coin launch, the feds came to granny’s house and knocked on her door, and she called me, having a heart attack, saying: ‘The FBI is here after you, what have you done?’”

Welch said she handed over her phone to the FBI and met with agents who “interrogated me, asking me questions and everything else related to crypto.”

“They cleared me, I was good to go,” Welch said.

Welch went viral for her response about an oral sex technique in a vox pop interview posted to YouTube in June.

The HAWK memecoin, based on her viral catchphrase, launched in early December and almost immediately lost 90% of its value and blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps’ alleged insider wallets and snipers bought up and dumped massive quantities of the token at launch.

Welch said on her podcast that the Securities and Exchange Commission also asked for her phone, and she sent it off “for two or three days” before she was cleared.

Welch’s lawyer James Sallah told TMZ in March that the SEC “closed the investigation without making any findings against, or seeking any monetary sanctions from, Haliey.”

“I trusted the wrong people”

Welch admitted knowing very little about crypto before the HAWK memecoin and said she “trusted the wrong people” for the launch.

She claimed a company, which she said she couldn’t name for legal reasons, was in full control of her X account, which posted videos of her promoting the memecoin.

Welch said she was sent lines to record on video, which were then posted on her X account by someone she trusted but could also not legally name.

She added that on the day of HAWK’s launch, she “kind of knew something was up” and was pulled into a room where a team of people told her to talk on a livestream with YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla.

“Coffeezilla got on there and they’re like ‘Mute it, mute it,’” Welch said. “Nobody warned me about this guy at all, like nobody at all, they didn’t tell me he was like a crypto wizard, that’s exactly what he is — he ate me the fuck up.”

Welch said she was only paid a marketing fee and “did not make a dime from the coin itself,” which she said had been totally spent on legal and public relations fees.

Despite being cleared of any legal wrongdoing, Welch took some accountability, admitting that she let many of her fans down who invested in the coin:

“It makes me feel really bad that they trusted me, and I led them to something that I did not have enough knowledge about. I did not have enough knowledge about crypto to be getting involved with it. And I knew that, but I got talked into it, and I trusted the wrong people.”

A group of HAWK buyers sued the alleged creators of the token in December, claiming Alex Schultz, the token’s backing Tuah the Moon Foundation, the token launchpad overHere Limited, and its founder Clinton So promoted and sold HAWK as an unregistered security.

Welch wasn’t named as a defendant.

Magazine: ‘Normie degens’ go all in on sports fan crypto tokens for the rewards

Politics

Revealed: Why Keir Starmer’s strategy to tackle Reform UK could end up backfiring

Published

3 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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Revealed: Why Keir Starmer's strategy to tackle Reform UK could end up backfiring

Has Labour got the right strategy to tackle Reform UK?

Nigel Farage’s party cost the Tories dozens, maybe 100-plus seats at the general election. Now it looks like the party is hitting Labour too. But has Sir Keir Starmer got the right answers?

Last year, Labour won a landslide because the Tory vote collapsed, in part because Reform UK took chunks of their supporters in constituencies across the UK.

And here is the situation on 1 May this year – the national equivalent vote share at the council elections put Reform well ahead in first place. Success – this time at the expense of Labour too.

How big a threat is this to MPs? As a very crude experiment, Sky News has looked at what would happen if this result was replicated evenly across parliamentary constituencies.

Within the areas where there were county council elections are 77 complete Westminster seats with sitting Labour MPs.

This includes places like Wycombe, where Treasury minister Emma Reynolds holds. Or Lincoln, won by Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer.

Now if – for fun – we mapped the country council results from 1 May evenly across these general election constituencies, almost all those Labour seats are gone. All lost, apart from five. That’s 72 out of 77 Labour MPs losing their seats and mostly to Reform UK.

What if we took that swing an applied across the whole country, places where there weren’t local elections?

Angela Rayner in Greater Manchester and Jess Phillips in Birmingham would lose their seats.

Yes this is a crude measure – it assumes a uniform swing can be drawn from the 1 May polls – and local and national elections are very different.

But importantly, YouGov’s latest national opinion polls paint a similar picture to the council elections. Meanwhile, 89 out of 98 constituencies where Reform came second place have Labour in first. Labour MPs are feeling the heat from Farage.

The Reform threat is real. Sir Keir Starmer knows it – and this year has started chasing Reform votes. Slashing aid spending. Abandoning green promises. Hard talk about immigration and living on an “Island of Strangers”.

Sensible given the clear and evident Reform UK threat? Actually – maybe not. Look at the data in detail:

This block here is all the people who voted Labour in last year’s general election. Now thanks to YouGov polling, we know what people in this block would do with their vote now.

It shows Labour has lost more than half of last year’s voters. Just 46% still say they’d still vote for Sir Keir’s party. But – despite the PM’s strategy – they’re not actually going to Reform in large numbers.

Just 6% of Labour’s voters at last year’s general election – six out of every 100 – said they would vote Reform now. That’s all. So where have they gone?

Well, they’ve been lost much more to liberal and left-wing parties – 12% to the Lib Dems, 9% to the Greens.

So just pause there. That means the number of Labour voters who have switched to the Lib Dems and Greens, arguably on the left of the political spectrum, is three times the number going to Reform to the right.

Just 2% go to the Tories.

And much more seriously for Labour, 22% aren’t going to vote, don’t know or won’t say.

The bottom line is people who voted Reform have never backed Labour in large numbers.

This shows how Reform supporters last year voted in each election since 2005. You can see – Reform voters are former UKIP voters. They’re Boris Johnson’s Tories.

Let’s put it another way. While 11% of Labour voters may one day be open to voting Reform, 70% are at risk of going to the Lib Dems or Greens – seven times the threat from Reform.

And typically, these voters don’t like the hard line, Reform-leaning policies of Sir Keir Starmer recently.

The local elections show there is a threat to Labour from Reform. But our data suggests Keir Starmer trying to be Nigel Farage lite isn’t the answer.

Is Labour’s strategy really working?

Politics

SEC charges Unicoin and executives for alleged $100 million fraud

Published

5 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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SEC charges Unicoin and executives for alleged 0 million fraud

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged crypto platform Unicoin and three of its executives, alleging they made false and misleading statements about its crypto assets that raised $100 million from investors.

The SEC said on May 20 that it charged Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Silvina Moschini, and former investment chief Alex Dominguez with misleading investors about certificates that conveyed rights to receive Unicoin tokens and stock.

Mark Cave, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, claimed the trio “exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings.”

“The real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company’s sales of rights certificates were illusory,” Cave added.

The SEC’s complaint, filed in a Manhattan federal court, charged Unicoin and the three executives with various securities laws violations and asks for permanent injunctive relief, along with paying back the allegedly ill-gotten gains.

Magazine: SEC’s U-turn on crypto leaves key questions unanswered