Former UK Post Office boss breaks down in inquiry over scandal that saw hundreds wrongly convicted

abcnews.go.com:

The former head of Britain’s Post Office Paula Vennells has broken down in tears on several occasions while giving evidence to an inquiry into one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice that saw hundreds of branch managers wrongly convicted o...

LONDON — The former head of Britain's Post Office Paula Vennells broke down in tears on several occasions as she gave evidence Wednesday to an inquiry into one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice that saw hundreds of branch managers wrongly convicted of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system.

Vennells, who earlier this year gave back her Commander of the Order of the British Empire title that she received in 2019, admitted that she had “made mistakes” but denied there was a conspiracy to cover up the scandal.

“I have no sense that there was any conspiracy at all,” she said. “My deep sorrow in this is that I think that individuals, myself included, made mistakes, they didn’t see things and hear things.”

After the Post Office introduced the Horizon information technology system 25 years ago to automate sales accounting, local managers began finding unexplained losses that bosses said they were responsible for covering.

The Post Office maintained that Horizon, which was made by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty. Vennells, who was chief executive from 2012 to 2019, a period that included the last few years of the scandal, had for years insisted that the system was “robust” despite the hundreds of workers who said they had done nothing wrong.

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 900 postal employees were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with some imprisoned and others forced