Morrisons director resigns in wake of Court of Appeal judgement

Paula Vennells, the ex-Post Office chief executive, is quitting the boards of two listed retailers.

It comes just days after her previous employer was found culpable over one of the largest miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.

Vennells’ departure as a director of Bradford-headquartered supermarket chain Morrisons, and home furnishings retailer Dunelm, has been formally announced following Friday’s verdict by the Court of Appeal.

She has been a non-executive director of Morrisons since January 2016.

Andrew Higginson, Morrisons chairman, said: “Paula has been an insightful, effective and hardworking non-executive director, and, on behalf of the Board, I want to thank her for her significant contribution over the last five years.”

Vennells was in charge at the Post Office between 2012 and 2019. This was a period when reports of a faulty IT system called Horizon were not properly investigated by the company’s board, leading to a massive miscarriage of justice involving scores of innocent workers.

More than 700 people were wrongly convicted of offences of theft, fraud and false accounting, in prosecutions between 2000 and 2014, and some of them were imprisoned.

Questions were raised about the behaviour of Post Office directors during this time, and Vennells has faced calls to have her bonuses clawed back and to be stripped of her CBE title, which was awarded for “services to the Post Office and to charity”.

On Friday, 39 former Post Office workers saw their criminal convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal.