The Guardian reports
The chief executive of the miscarriage of justice watchdog spent thousands of pounds of public money on luxury French hotels while enrolling on courses at an elite business school at which her organisation’s then chair held positions.
Karen Kneller, the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, is known to have regularly attended Insead business school in Fontainebleau over the past five years.
Kneller’s stays included a director’s course whose fees are currently advertised at more than £21,000 for 10 days’ teaching over three trips, as well as a week-long programme on “digital disruption and innovation”. She also took a three-day “Leading from the chair” course in 2021, the fees for which are currently £7,500.
Helen Pitcher, the former chair of the CCRC, held multiple positions at Insead while Kneller attended these courses, including as president of the business school’s directors network board.
Pitcher resigned from the CCRC this month, saying she had been “scapegoated” over the Andrew Malkinson case after an independent panel ruled she was no longer fit to be chair. Malkinson spent 17 years in prison for a 2003 rape he did not commit.
Now, as the organisation charged with considering whether a dossier of new evidence in the case of Lucy Letby merits a return to the court of appeal, the CCRC is expected to come under renewed scrutiny. Some staff have raised concerns that the organisation’s leadership is not up to the task.
Kneller has returned to Insead regularly, most recently staying in a luxury room at its in-house four-star hotel for a week’s training in December. The Ermitage hotel includes a terrace bar overlooking the Fontainebleau forest, a fitness centre and squash courts.
Course fees do not include the cost of staying at the hotel, at up to £194 a night, or travel, which is all understood to have been covered by the CCRC. Some of Kneller’s Insead courses were in London but the Guardian understands that most were in France.
As chief executive and accounting officer, the CCRC says Kneller is “responsible for safeguarding the public funds allocated to us, and for ensuring propriety and regularity in the handling of those public funds”.
One staff member said there was a clear “conflict of interest” in Kneller being sent on courses at an institution Pitcher was involved in “at a location that is vastly more expensive than very similar courses available in the UK”.
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