On her second day of questioning, former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has told the inquiry into wrongful prosecutions of subpostmasters that media attention wasn’t a factor in her refusing to re-examine past cases.

Her first day before the inquiry was punctuated with her tearfully denying knowledge of the Post Office’s dogged pursual of innocent people through private prosecutions. Her second day provided arguably more substantive evidence of her role, the advice she was taking, and how she perceived the ongoing scandal.

The inquiry saw correspondence with the Post Office’s then Head of PR who said opening cases for review could have a ‘ballistic effect’ and ‘fuel the story’. Vennells said she would not have taken advice on this based on the PR outcome alone, but this was quickly refuted by Jason Beer KC who produced her response:  ‘You are right to call this out. And I will take your steer, no issue.’

The, usually silent, gallery in the room where the evidence is being presented jeered at this response.

Vennells has also denied that by refusing to review cases after problems with the Horizon system were identified in 2013, that this led to a ‘lost decade’ in which more people were wrongfully prosecuted and miscarriages of justice were denied and ignored.

During her second day of giving evidence she said she didn’t recall ‘making any conscious decision not to go back and put in place a review of all past criminal cases’.

So far the inquiry has heard from Vennells how little she was allegedly aware of while in her position as Chief Executive. She denies being told of legal advice that said reviewing Horizon was a ‘high risk’ approach and that they should consider only reviewing cases where the wrongfully accused had involved their local MP.

A key point in this scandal was the false evidence presented by Gareth Jenkins, a senior engineer at Fujitsu. Jenkins served as an expert witness during many of the trials in which subpostmasters where convicted, testifying that there were no ‘bugs’ in the system. This was revealed to be false, as it contradicted a report he had written describing these problems.

Vennells was questioned on Thursday about her knowledge of the inaccuracies in Jenkins’ evidence. When questioned she said she was made aware in the middle of 2013 that there had been an issue with two bugs but says she didn’t ‘join the dots’ that this might have relevance to the question of whether to review past cases.

This week’s evidence marks a significant juncture in the inquiry, as Vennells had not spoken publicly about her role in the prosecution of hundreds of innocent Post Office employees. Many of those affected will be unsatisfied with her account of her actions.

John Hyde, deputy news editor at the Law Society Gazette, noted on Twitter: ‘Paula Vennells was on top of things enough to justify her massive CEO salary, but not on top of things enough to know anything about the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.’