RUTH SUNDERLAND: Hubris of Post Office’s Paula Vennells

Hubris: Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells

Many things have changed in my three decades in financial journalism. Back in the early days, we used call boxes, copy takers, tape recorders and pagers.

Now we carry all that capability in our pocket – in an iPhone. In my first job, the white heat of technology meant clattering on an Amstrad.

By the time Covid struck we could produce a paper from our attics and spare rooms. One thing that has not changed is executive scandal and hubris. What has altered is the pace and quantity. We are only just into January, and already there have been three bosses in the limelight in the space of less than a week, for all the wrong reasons.

It was a vintage year for scandal in 2023, with the CBI, Crispin Odey, BP’s Bernard Looney et al in the stocks. If we carry on at this clip, 2024 will outdo all that by Burns Night. The bosses in hot water began with Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief, who is facing fresh calls to hand back her CBE following a TV drama based on the lives of postmasters wrongly accused of theft.

Then came Sebastien de Montessus, ousted from his job at FTSE 100-listed firm Endeavour Mining, where he had earned nearly £18m in 2021, making him the highest paid boss of a blue chip company that year.

He was accused over an ‘irregular payment’ of nearly £5m and some unrelated allegations about behaviour towards colleagues were thrown in.

Remarks by Sir Howard Davies, the chairman of NatWest, on Radio 4’s Today, to the effect it is not that hard to buy a house in Britain, may seem a relatively trivial gaffe.

But of all people, he should have known the dangers of blurting things out to the BBC, having recently lost a chief executive because she blabbed details of Nigel Farage’s finances to its business editor.

But, as the great American Jazz Age novelist F Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he were around today, chief executives and chairmen are different from you and me.

They are richer, yes, and more arrogant: because they can afford to be. Paula Vennells is seeing her good name dragged through the mud, as were the good names of the innocent postmasters.

The difference is that she is cushioned by wealth and well-equipped to defend herself. She has hired an expensive London law firm to try to salvage her reputation. Unlike Jo Hamilton – one of the victims who was so terrified of prison she pleaded guilty to a crime she did not commit to avoid a sentence – Vennells will not have to work as a cleaner to make ends meet. She and her ilk do not necessarily see episodes that would be career ending for most of us, as anything of the sort.

Vennells has clung on to her CBE and also stayed in lucrative directorships at retailers Morrisons and Dunelm even after the Post Office scandal emerged, though she subsequently stepped down. Sir Howard Davies has had mishaps in his career, most notably at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was director when the LSE accepted a £1.5m donation from the family of the late Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi.

An independent report found him personally responsible for some of the failures that resulted in the scandal.

Yet a rapid comeback ensued, first as chairman of the UK Airports Commission and then as chairman of RBS/NatWest.

At the beginning of my career, executive pay and rewards were only just starting to balloon. This was accompanied by concerns pay would get out of hand, as indeed has been the case. The justification for super-human pay was that these were exceptional individuals. In truth, they are all too fallibly human.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk