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”.
A government source said the spending did “not reflect the new government’s expectations of the best use of the CCRC’s funding”.
A spokesperson for Pitcher said the Ministry of Justice had approved the business case for Kneller to attend Insead. They also said that all external interests, including Pitcher’s association with the business school, were “fully declared according to CCRC guidelines”.
Pitcher’s roles at Insead while Kneller attended courses included being president of its directors network board and chairing its Directors Club Ltd until October 2022. Pitcher was also on the executive committee of Insead’s alumni association and vice-president of its global clubs until July 2023.
Insead was rated Europe’s top business school by the Financial Times in 2024 and describes itself as the “business school for the world”.
Pitcher said in her resignation letter that “the main criticism” made of her by the panel that decided she was not fit to continue as chair centred “on whether I ‘sufficiently challenged the performance’ of the CEO and some of the staff she was responsible for”.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Pitcher said she had been told on arrival at the CCRC to remove the entire senior management team, but decided that “wasn’t viable” and instead chose to “mentor and train senior staff”, delivering improvements that were acknowledged in every appraisal.
“Staff surveys [during Pitcher’s tenure] were invariably positive, other than the responses of a small group known to the CEO and her top team,” they said.
The Guardian revealed this month that Kneller had been accused of attempting to “sanitise” an independent review into her organisation’s handling of the Malkinson case. After that story broke, staff were told by Kneller in a weekly briefing that it was a “return to business as usual” and that “nothing has changed and there is no news”.
An independent review last year found that the watchdog missed multiple opportunities to help Malkinson. Chris Henley KC found Malkinson could have been exonerated almost a decade earlier if the CCRC had properly understood the forensic evidence.
Kneller was director of casework when the CCRC undertook what Henley described as “very poor” work on Malkinson’s first application to overturn his conviction. Leading legal figures have described her position as being “completely untenable”, after more than two decades at the organisation.
Kneller and the CCRC were approached for comment. A government spokesperson said: “This training course was wholly funded from within the CCRC budget. Arm’s-length bodies’ training spend which exceeds £10,000 must be approved by the sponsoring department and is subsequently approved by the Cabinet Office.”
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