She is the unacceptable face of the Post Office scandal. But the conduct of Paula Vennells should not lead us to forget there were other bad bosses in that dreadful affair.
Nor should we overlook the other cases of egregious corporate bullying and injustice that have ruined lives, such as the HBOS Reading scandal and the behaviour of the GRG unit at NatWest.
The financial service industry is littered with arrogant executives. Vennells’ Post Office predecessor was Alan Cook, who has been conspicuously absent in the melee.
After overseeing the prosecution of 161 innocent postmasters, he became chairman of insurance company LV. There, he fronted up a cack-handed attempt to sell off the 180-year-old mutual, which was owned and run by its members, to private equity.
At the time, I noted that his performance and that of chief executive Mark Hartigan were so laughable it made them look like the Laurel and Hardy of insurance. Except it was not remotely funny. The pair tried to bulldoze through a takeover against their members’ interests, relying on inertia and misleading propaganda to win the vote.
Bad boss: Paula Vennells is the unacceptable face of the Post Office scandal
The private equity bid was defeated because, after a campaign by the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, members refused to back it in sufficient numbers.
The injustice here is not on a par with the Post Office. But it typifies a certain mindset among corporate panjandrums. They know best and, in their eyes, members, customers and staff are fodder for their ambition. And, as the nation is united in anger over the Post Office scandal, spare a thought for the innocent ordinary people who have had their lives ruined in other shameful episodes. Victims of two big bank debacles, HBOS Reading and RBS GRG, will wish there had been a drama about them.
At the Reading branch of HBOS, now owned by Lloyds, six bankers and advisers defrauded millions of pounds from business customers between 2003 and 2007.
The six, who splashed the cash on luxury vacations and hookers, were sentenced in 2017 to up to 12 years in prison. One small businesswoman I spoke to then told me how, when her firm fell into their clutches, she lost her company and her marriage. It felt, she said, like ‘financial rape’.
Lloyds has apologised and says lessons have been learned. It has paid out more than £100m to victims. Yet the affair is still not fully resolved, two decades on. The bank launched a review of customer cases in 2017. In 2019, it began an independent quality review of the first review, led by Sir Ross Cranston, who, though he acknowledged the generosity of the scheme, found a number of failings. As a result, there was a re-review, led by a retired judge.
Still with me? As of now, more than 50 per cent of victims have accepted a £3m net of tax settlement – implying almost half have not yet received their redress. One in ten has yet to receive an initial decision.
A separate review by Dame Linda Dobbs into whether Lloyds investigated properly has yet to report.
Some customers of the former GRG division of Royal Bank of Scotland, now NatWest, who say their businesses were crippled by its actions, are still chasing compensation. In 2019, the Financial Conduct Authority said that because GRG dealt with small firms, rather than individuals, it was largely unregulated and there was nothing much it could do about it.
The makers of the Post Office drama have performed a great service. Corporate injustices happen too often. When they do, they should be righted swiftly and with vigour.
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