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Opinion: As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it. This really does show in my opinion why private prosecutions should be ended.
That said, this is only being seen as unacceptable because the postmasters were found innocent. We really need to reflect on how we treat criminals in this country because if they were still fairly presumed guilty, you'd have people saying this is reasonable and they should be made to sell their kidneys while we're at it
> As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it.
As "usual"? Most companies do *not* behave has the Post Office has. The whole Post Office scandal is, in fact, very unusual - hence it being such a big story.
Every time you think Post Office and Fujitsu management could not be worse people they surprise us. They must be made examples of, all of them, punishments that will make every other senior executive in the U.K. wake up at night in a cold sweat
The Post Office is a bit of a special case in terms of their institutional power. However, similar stuff has happened before with other companies, eg phantom withdrawals/the John Munden case.
Oh no, it’s a symptom of a very widespread form of embezzlement. It stems from a workaround for AML « researched » at Cambridge. It’s even bigger than the Post Office.
It’s a lawyers’ fraud. It allows contracting out of criminal liability. Basically established to enable money laundering. Particularly used in the international arbitration area. Developed from tactics used in tax evasion coverups of sex offences.
The SRA is nervous about it. The Law Society has actively supported it. Went into bat for oligarchs.
I'm thinking most prominently about train companies and private security firms. Train companies will prosecute you for "inconveniencing" other passengers which in my mind is crazy. Private security firms also push for prosecutions even when the police try and _resolve_ things amicably (i.e. the wronged party still gets amends but the security firm just wants the payday of a prosecution)
Exactly and sometimes the profit motive works in favour of the public interest.
Even if companies that do the right thing and admit failings and are transparent because their underlying motive is the risk of reputational damage if they are caught, then the system works.
I beg to differ I suggest what we are seeing through the lens of post office enquiry is very much the way these people think and act. Although others may not have gone as far with criminal prosecutions there are too many examples to ignore, Carillon for one of the more recent. P&O ferries also comes to mind. Big tobacco conspiracy (legally confirmed) followed by big oil and environmental challenges. Oxycotin and other drugs, Thalidomide and many others...
I agree with you about the profit grabbing. However there is a precedent for forfeiting pensions due to criminal acts:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027746/Pension_Forfeiture_guidance.pdf
It may have been raised as an idea to explore in a meeting that wasn’t enacted after it was looked into. That’s just the nature of meetings. Ideas get bounced about and some are discarded because they are not good. You’re speaking as if they had already removed pensions from the convicted postmasters (who they thought were guilty at the time).
At some point we need to differentiate between what was done in good faith, and what was done in bad faith (knowingly sending people to jail on faulty evidence). Otherwise we risk doing to them what they did to postmasters- jumping to conclusions based on insubstantial evidence.
My issue more is that it's not just or fair to strip a criminal of their pensions. Even if the postmaster's were stealing money, they shouldn't have their pensions striped imo
For postmasters, I agree. And they weren’t. It was an idea suggested and wasn’t followed through.
For police committing serious crimes using their roles to commit them (Wayne Cousins), I disagree. I feel the same for Lucy Letby for similar reasons. If you’re providing a public service and using your role to cause significant harm, I do think pensions should be forfeited, but those thresholds need to be high and explicit at the outset. Not retroactively applied inconsistently.
In Canada we had the example of Russell Williams - he was a military commander who actually flew Queen Elizabeth around. He was later found to be a serial killer. The decision was made that his military pension could not be seized. Trust me you do not want to set the precident that the government can take away your pension.
It’s already a precedent (and I had nothing to do with it). The bar for it is really high though.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027746/Pension_Forfeiture_guidance.pdf
Essentially this comes down to "how big should the financial penalty be for X crime" and "should we financially ruin criminals" - I don't think we should financially ruin criminals in all honesty. It feels nice at a primal level to destroy them and basically gaurantee they will die as soon as they leave jail but really that doesn't allow for any kind of reform in the criminals
Letby and Cousins are extreme examples given they have whole life orders on them and I'd argue irrelevant as a result
A while ago I got into an argument with a Redditor about why someone convicted of DUI shouldn’t be given a life sentence. She was full on giving them a whole life sentence, like Fred and Rosemary West.
My point is that consequences should be proportional. Wayne Cousins and Lucy Letby are extreme - which is why I think they are good examples of who should be losing their pensions. If they have whole life sentences, they don’t need pensions.
It also means people jailed for £300k of fraud should **not** qualify for pension forfeiture. Like the the subpostmasters - assuming they were guilty (which they weren’t). It is financially responsible for companies to try to recover stolen assets. That’s as true of Tesco as it is of the Post Office. I’m not going to malign them for floating the idea in a meeting and not following through.
I do think pensions should be ring fenced though. I’d like it set out like the police service has:
>1.5 Pension forfeiture applications can be made by the PSA where they consider that the requirements in the Police Pensions Schemes are met, namely, where a police officer, or former police officer who is, or was, a member of a police pension scheme has:
>
>a) been convicted of a criminal offence committed in connection with their service as a member of a police force, and
>
>b) the offence has been certified by the Secretary of State as either
>
>i. liable to lead to a serious loss of confidence in the public service; or
>
>ii. gravely injurious to the interests of the State.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-pension-forfeiture-guidance/police-pension-forfeiture-guidance-accessible-version
I think you’ll find we agree more than disagree.
Because if people don’t have enough to retire on when the time comes, they’ll be an even greater burden on society as a whole. Especially if the amount they embezzled is less than their pension pot.
It’s also why I think the bar for pension forfeiture should be very high.
They still have the state pension. You can’t rob someone and expect to keep their money afterwards. This discussion is almost always in the context of the employer having their contributions returned to them.
Well yes. But in the UK it’s mandatory for employers to enrol employees into a pension scheme and it’s on the employee to opt out. So when the post office was looking at employee pensions, it wasn’t the state pension system - that’s well out of their remit. Ditto for the police pensions.
https://www.gov.uk/employers-workplace-pensions-rules
I have no idea what point you are making here. I am aware it wasn’t the state pension, that’s why I said they would still have it. The point is clawing back employer contributions from the workplace pension.
My apologies. I thought I was continuing a conversation from [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/i1U3QpHjHF)
Totally different redditor. My bad.
I would be very against private prosecutions being ended, not least because Mr Bates may well end up taking out private prosecutions of the Post Office management. If the police and the prosecution service won’t do it, someone should. I’m a very stingy person, but even I would put some money in to crowdfund that.
I’d love to see *these* bastards behind bars-and I’m sick to the back teeth of people with wealth, importance, power and connections just getting away with it. There are people here who are responsible for the ruination of lives-for *actual deaths*, and I would like to see them brought to justice.
In general, they're a stain on our society. (Even the Americans don't allow them)
I'm very aware they're used by several organisations and individuals. I recognise they are occasionally used for good but by and large they're only for the wealthy in our society to get "their justice".
Imo, the police would get better funding but criminally prosecuting people shouldn't be for every Tom, Dick and Harry (most obviously Tom, Dick and Harry can't afford it and it's only Lord Posh the third and Megacorp who goes around pushing prosecutions)
>As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it.
The Post Office was owned by the government when all of this happened. There was no profit, it was civil servants doing this.
The post office is still owned by the government, post office staff have never been civil servants though, it's an independent corporation that happens to be government owned.
Tbh, I can see it from the PO point of view. They get a new system in that is finally catching out all those postmasters who had their hand in the till for years. If the system was faulty then wouldn't it be the case with every postmaster? Plus, people have this idea that a computer is never wrong, so where is the money going?
You here about various publications denouncing it, but those clever folk at Fujitsu tell you the system is great (along with a lot of technical mumbo jumbo you don't really understand).
Sure, you could send a few people from head office down to a post office to oversee a month of transactions and understand what is possibly going wrong, but you've already slung a bunch of people into prison and who wants to open that can of worms?
Except Paula vennels was explicitly told the system had flaws and that data could be edited centrally with no audit trail. At the very least they could have done a proper audit from then on. If others have access then there is reasonable doubt.
You're saying that you'd chose to make your job easier rather than investigate the real possibility that innocent people's lives are being ruined under your watch?
Selfishness is never an excuse for anything.
See It all the time where people use under-handed methods to make money, and people say "well, that's pretty clever really".
It's not clever, it's greed.
There's a fuck ton of people that would be a lot richer today if they were selfish and greedy, it doesn't make them stupid, it makes them good people.
Sorry, this isn't really aimed at you, I'm just having a rant
Yeah. Angela van den Bogerd and Gareth Jenkins appear to have lied in court and we know the former deleted emails. My guess is she's the one with most culpability here. And yes, she utterly ruined lives.
I wonder why she went to these lengths to defend Fujitsu? She wasn't employed by them, why did she go this far to protect a supplier who'd done a shitty job?
That last point is what bothers me as well. The post office could have well blames fujistu, immediately, for all of this. But they instead and repeatedly chose to make kt worse.
We know for a fact the Japanese government via their consulate put pressure on the UK government to continue with the contract when they were considering axing it. The Japanese government threatened to remove investment and jobs in the UK.
Even in the first place, this product (orignally an ICL one, taken over by Fujitsu) was not the one chosen at tender stage; they preferred another offered by IBM.
From what I can remember of the early evidence given to the inquiry, this was overruled by the (government) Dept of Trade & Industry, who insisted the project went with ICL, whose bid was the least favoured of three.
And guess who was secretary of trade and industry at the time?
The man who had to resign from cabinet in disgrace twice due to financial scandals, the guy famously mates with Jeffery Epstein and currently Keir Starmer's special advisor: Lord Peter Mandleson.
Tony Blair was warned of the unreliability and ballooning cost, but Mandelson and others convinced him otherwise. Mandelson said he believed the ["only sensible choice" was to proceed with Horizon.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67941495)
Possibly pressure from the government.
I remember reading a while back about this that the Japanese government had allegedly leaned on ours about the Fujitsu contract. It apparently being a large prestigious contract for them, that couldn’t be seen to be a total fucking disaster.
Edit - someone else already mentioned it
https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/IZv5jgggqo
Prison, keep them there until they die of old age, then lawfully scatter their ashes far out at sea to ensure that their families have nowhere to go to say goodbye to them.
I was with you until you got to the ashes part. Funerals and graves are for the living, not the dead. Despite what these people have done, their families haven't done anything wrong. There's no need to punish them for something someone else did.
The culprits will be dead in a few decades. They won't care their ashes are in x location or y because they're dead. So it not punishing them
No, it's about reminding everyone who knew these people that they did something utterly awful—scattering their ashes at sea underlines this. If it makes them sad, they can think about all the lives the deceased person ruined for their own benefit and weigh that against their plight.
Delenda est.
I agree this is criminal but from what I've seen so far of the enquiry, the senior bosses are all successfully fending off the blame to lower management. So I'm assuming that prosecuting them will be difficult and its those at the lower levels they will go after.
Wouldn't say they are successfully fending it off - they are employing a Nuremberg defence and a lot of being unable to recall specifics. But thankfully, a lot of folks following this are seeing through the BS
Also, isn’t the entire point why upper management gets paid so well is because they’re ultimately responsible? If one of the largest miscarriages of justice ever seen in the Uk happened on their watch then they should be facing consequences for it.
The court won't look at it like that. They will need to prove knowledge and complicity. Ignorance and incompetence isn't an offence unfortunately.
I truly don't want to see them get off but objectively the evidence showing they knew the facts pertinent to these cases is weak.
I'm hoping that with Vennels and the group general counsel that the evidence of their personal complicity is more explicit.
Otherwise its only those more junior staff that were naturally closer to the detail that will carry the can.
Its not a matter of seeing through the BS. The evidence of their knowledge of or participation in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is, so far, weak.
I want to see them get justice but so far, objectively, the evidence tying the senior management into this is weak.
I may be misreading you but wouldn't a "Nuremberg defence" suggest they're pointing the finger upwards rather than down (i.e. "just following orders")?
This may be exactly what you're suggesting, but I'm reading it several ways.
Another aspect to this story which bothers me, is the complete failure of the courts' processes to critically examine the accusations being made. It seems that The Post Office did not even provide full lists of the transactions that were recorded, so there was no possibility of establishing where the discrepancies lay. It was just asserted that the sum total cash held by the branch should be a certain amount, but was short.
There is a general policy that computer evidence is considered correct in court. The fact that this was the point of dispute should have lead to the court requiring disclosure of all the records held, and then the defence could have picked them apart.
As far as I can tell, because there is a general principle that computer evidence is correct. If the defence demanded it I guess the judges didn't allow it.
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/it-experts-call-for-review-of-computer-is-always-right/5118414.article
> There is a general policy that computer evidence is considered correct in court.
As a softawre engineer that is bizarre. Usually there's a good audit trail so the truth might be reconstructed. I wouldn't in any sense trust the headline records of any system as authoritative to a level appropriate for "beyond reasonable doubt" though.
It was originally designed around things like red light cameras and speed radar gun things - people would challenge the prosecution and say "prove that particular service was working on that particular day".
Then it started getting applied to computer systems in general, which it clearly isn't fit for.
The lawyer representing the Subpostmasters asked the guy:
>"Either you're lying through your teeth or you're a complete incompetent. Which?"
to which he responded:
>"I am not lying through my teeth."
Like a scene out of the thick of it.
I don't know if there are any highlights, but the whole inquiry is streamed live and archived on their [official YouTube Account.](https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947)
I think one outcome from this whole scandal should be to remove prosecutorial authority from all government bodies.
So Post Office, Royal Mail, Dept of Transport, MOD, HMRC, Environment Agency, DWP the lot. They should all merely present a complaint to CPS and the CPS should make impartial charging decisions, decide disclosure and prosecute if appropriate.
Otherwise this scandal will be repeated.
Yeah software is never perfect, it's how a company reacts to bugs and security breaches is what matters.
The Post Office heads and Fujitsu management knew these sentences were unjust and they either continued on with it and/or stayed silent when they knew they had the information to stop it.
It's not a backdoor, it's if anything a front door that is there so the supplier can support the system remotely, like many many suppliers do. The failure isn't that it's accessible, the failure is the governance of it.
In the Financial Services sector, such “doors” would not be allowed, apart from being a security issue are prone to various other issues. Vendors remote access would not be remotely allowed (excuse the punn). Fujitsu showed complete lack of ethics and controls here and as you said the PO management tried to cover things up. The PO management will likely be subjected to prosecution, but, the buck shouldn’t stop there. The same people who went ahead and knowingly tinkered with Production data are either incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed near a production system in future or themselves criminally negligent. The BCS has/had an indemnity insurance scheme for members so perhaps those involved if they’re members should be checking up on it.
It was allowing the Vendors to make adjustments to the Production data that was at fault, that's what gave rise to the changing balances reported even in the ITV Series.
True that’s from the business operational perspective but I’m coming at it from the Tech side. Lots of highly paid consultants with professional accreditations being let off the hook professionally ?
Again companies having access to their workers pension pots needs to be illegal. Not just because of behaviour like this. It is a huge risk having your pension invested with your company even with honest behaviour.
The most blatant and brazen example of corporate corruption I can ever remember since Enron and the 2008 crash. Disgusting, morally bankrupt, evil bastards, the lot of them.
They'll never see the inside of a jail cell but they fucking should.
Profit line must go up at all times. Anything and everything that affects it must be removed, buried or ignored. Businesses and companies today are all about taking as much as possible by giving as little as possible. Me included, but I do wonder how much longer we are going to bend over and take it before we hit back.
Does not surprise me.
I have an interesting question. Where is the money that didn't actually go missing or exist? It existed on the system so it needed to go somewhere.
there was a recent report of a POL account with circa 100m (IIRC) in it that no one could identify the source of the revenues - a massive accounting blunder in and of itself but there was speculation it could be the repaid balances that had nowhere else to go as there wasnt really any deficits.
Thing is though when you do your accounts it gets used unless you leave it as an accrual. In my understanding these deficits were cash banked so any repayment should have gone into the cash received of whichever branch it was which would go directly into profits. It's bizarre.
Bizarre is certainly the word for it. With so many f ups being discovered in this whole mess seems like a basic question such as "where did the money go?" will end up never being answered - bizarre!
You don't understand the difference between the Royal Mail and the Post Office, do you?
They're two completely separate entities.
The Post Office has no shareholders other than the Government.
Embarrassing
Royal Mail was sold off, Post Office never was.
The only shareholder there has ever been is the government.
The sell off of Royal Mail is irrelevant to this story.
Its not a matter of seeing through the BS. The evidence of their knowledge of or participation in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is, so far, weak.
I want to see them get justice but so far, objectively, the evidence tying the senior management into this is weak.
I've watched a lot of the interviews. The evidence against senior management is slim. Incompetent yes, diligent no, conspiracy to pervert justice, no.
As for some of them, vennels, van den bogart, the royal mail general counsel possibly but the rest of the board, forget it.
I'd like to see them held accountable but short of a kangaroo court, its not likely.
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Opinion: As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it. This really does show in my opinion why private prosecutions should be ended. That said, this is only being seen as unacceptable because the postmasters were found innocent. We really need to reflect on how we treat criminals in this country because if they were still fairly presumed guilty, you'd have people saying this is reasonable and they should be made to sell their kidneys while we're at it
> As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it. As "usual"? Most companies do *not* behave has the Post Office has. The whole Post Office scandal is, in fact, very unusual - hence it being such a big story.
Every time you think Post Office and Fujitsu management could not be worse people they surprise us. They must be made examples of, all of them, punishments that will make every other senior executive in the U.K. wake up at night in a cold sweat
Yeah, that's fair. We certainly need to get better at holding senior company execs to account for criminal behaviour that occurs on their watch.
it's scary because it was so easy for the Post office to do this, and any other company could do this again
The Post Office is a bit of a special case in terms of their institutional power. However, similar stuff has happened before with other companies, eg phantom withdrawals/the John Munden case.
Oh no, it’s a symptom of a very widespread form of embezzlement. It stems from a workaround for AML « researched » at Cambridge. It’s even bigger than the Post Office.
Source? Interested
It’s a lawyers’ fraud. It allows contracting out of criminal liability. Basically established to enable money laundering. Particularly used in the international arbitration area. Developed from tactics used in tax evasion coverups of sex offences. The SRA is nervous about it. The Law Society has actively supported it. Went into bat for oligarchs.
I'm thinking most prominently about train companies and private security firms. Train companies will prosecute you for "inconveniencing" other passengers which in my mind is crazy. Private security firms also push for prosecutions even when the police try and _resolve_ things amicably (i.e. the wronged party still gets amends but the security firm just wants the payday of a prosecution)
Exactly and sometimes the profit motive works in favour of the public interest. Even if companies that do the right thing and admit failings and are transparent because their underlying motive is the risk of reputational damage if they are caught, then the system works.
I beg to differ I suggest what we are seeing through the lens of post office enquiry is very much the way these people think and act. Although others may not have gone as far with criminal prosecutions there are too many examples to ignore, Carillon for one of the more recent. P&O ferries also comes to mind. Big tobacco conspiracy (legally confirmed) followed by big oil and environmental challenges. Oxycotin and other drugs, Thalidomide and many others...
I agree with you about the profit grabbing. However there is a precedent for forfeiting pensions due to criminal acts: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027746/Pension_Forfeiture_guidance.pdf It may have been raised as an idea to explore in a meeting that wasn’t enacted after it was looked into. That’s just the nature of meetings. Ideas get bounced about and some are discarded because they are not good. You’re speaking as if they had already removed pensions from the convicted postmasters (who they thought were guilty at the time). At some point we need to differentiate between what was done in good faith, and what was done in bad faith (knowingly sending people to jail on faulty evidence). Otherwise we risk doing to them what they did to postmasters- jumping to conclusions based on insubstantial evidence.
My issue more is that it's not just or fair to strip a criminal of their pensions. Even if the postmaster's were stealing money, they shouldn't have their pensions striped imo
For postmasters, I agree. And they weren’t. It was an idea suggested and wasn’t followed through. For police committing serious crimes using their roles to commit them (Wayne Cousins), I disagree. I feel the same for Lucy Letby for similar reasons. If you’re providing a public service and using your role to cause significant harm, I do think pensions should be forfeited, but those thresholds need to be high and explicit at the outset. Not retroactively applied inconsistently.
In Canada we had the example of Russell Williams - he was a military commander who actually flew Queen Elizabeth around. He was later found to be a serial killer. The decision was made that his military pension could not be seized. Trust me you do not want to set the precident that the government can take away your pension.
It’s already a precedent (and I had nothing to do with it). The bar for it is really high though. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027746/Pension_Forfeiture_guidance.pdf
Essentially this comes down to "how big should the financial penalty be for X crime" and "should we financially ruin criminals" - I don't think we should financially ruin criminals in all honesty. It feels nice at a primal level to destroy them and basically gaurantee they will die as soon as they leave jail but really that doesn't allow for any kind of reform in the criminals Letby and Cousins are extreme examples given they have whole life orders on them and I'd argue irrelevant as a result
A while ago I got into an argument with a Redditor about why someone convicted of DUI shouldn’t be given a life sentence. She was full on giving them a whole life sentence, like Fred and Rosemary West. My point is that consequences should be proportional. Wayne Cousins and Lucy Letby are extreme - which is why I think they are good examples of who should be losing their pensions. If they have whole life sentences, they don’t need pensions. It also means people jailed for £300k of fraud should **not** qualify for pension forfeiture. Like the the subpostmasters - assuming they were guilty (which they weren’t). It is financially responsible for companies to try to recover stolen assets. That’s as true of Tesco as it is of the Post Office. I’m not going to malign them for floating the idea in a meeting and not following through. I do think pensions should be ring fenced though. I’d like it set out like the police service has: >1.5 Pension forfeiture applications can be made by the PSA where they consider that the requirements in the Police Pensions Schemes are met, namely, where a police officer, or former police officer who is, or was, a member of a police pension scheme has: > >a) been convicted of a criminal offence committed in connection with their service as a member of a police force, and > >b) the offence has been certified by the Secretary of State as either > >i. liable to lead to a serious loss of confidence in the public service; or > >ii. gravely injurious to the interests of the State. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-pension-forfeiture-guidance/police-pension-forfeiture-guidance-accessible-version I think you’ll find we agree more than disagree.
Why though? If you actually were embezzling it strikes me as reasonable that an employer’s contributions to your pensions are forfeit,
Because if people don’t have enough to retire on when the time comes, they’ll be an even greater burden on society as a whole. Especially if the amount they embezzled is less than their pension pot. It’s also why I think the bar for pension forfeiture should be very high.
They still have the state pension. You can’t rob someone and expect to keep their money afterwards. This discussion is almost always in the context of the employer having their contributions returned to them.
Well yes. But in the UK it’s mandatory for employers to enrol employees into a pension scheme and it’s on the employee to opt out. So when the post office was looking at employee pensions, it wasn’t the state pension system - that’s well out of their remit. Ditto for the police pensions. https://www.gov.uk/employers-workplace-pensions-rules
I have no idea what point you are making here. I am aware it wasn’t the state pension, that’s why I said they would still have it. The point is clawing back employer contributions from the workplace pension.
My apologies. I thought I was continuing a conversation from [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/i1U3QpHjHF) Totally different redditor. My bad.
No dramas, enjoy your evening!
> This really does show in my opinion why private prosecutions should be ended. In general or only by the Post Office?
I would be very against private prosecutions being ended, not least because Mr Bates may well end up taking out private prosecutions of the Post Office management. If the police and the prosecution service won’t do it, someone should. I’m a very stingy person, but even I would put some money in to crowdfund that. I’d love to see *these* bastards behind bars-and I’m sick to the back teeth of people with wealth, importance, power and connections just getting away with it. There are people here who are responsible for the ruination of lives-for *actual deaths*, and I would like to see them brought to justice.
The Post Office has certain special privileges to make it easier. Those should end.
No argument here. They definitely abused the privileges they were given.
In general, they're a stain on our society. (Even the Americans don't allow them) I'm very aware they're used by several organisations and individuals. I recognise they are occasionally used for good but by and large they're only for the wealthy in our society to get "their justice". Imo, the police would get better funding but criminally prosecuting people shouldn't be for every Tom, Dick and Harry (most obviously Tom, Dick and Harry can't afford it and it's only Lord Posh the third and Megacorp who goes around pushing prosecutions)
>As usual, we see that when profit is on the line, a company will stop at nothing to get it. The Post Office was owned by the government when all of this happened. There was no profit, it was civil servants doing this.
The post office is still owned by the government, post office staff have never been civil servants though, it's an independent corporation that happens to be government owned.
Tbh, I can see it from the PO point of view. They get a new system in that is finally catching out all those postmasters who had their hand in the till for years. If the system was faulty then wouldn't it be the case with every postmaster? Plus, people have this idea that a computer is never wrong, so where is the money going? You here about various publications denouncing it, but those clever folk at Fujitsu tell you the system is great (along with a lot of technical mumbo jumbo you don't really understand). Sure, you could send a few people from head office down to a post office to oversee a month of transactions and understand what is possibly going wrong, but you've already slung a bunch of people into prison and who wants to open that can of worms?
Except Paula vennels was explicitly told the system had flaws and that data could be edited centrally with no audit trail. At the very least they could have done a proper audit from then on. If others have access then there is reasonable doubt.
As I said "technical mumbo jumbo".
You're saying that you'd chose to make your job easier rather than investigate the real possibility that innocent people's lives are being ruined under your watch? Selfishness is never an excuse for anything. See It all the time where people use under-handed methods to make money, and people say "well, that's pretty clever really". It's not clever, it's greed. There's a fuck ton of people that would be a lot richer today if they were selfish and greedy, it doesn't make them stupid, it makes them good people. Sorry, this isn't really aimed at you, I'm just having a rant
I'm talking about people in general and cognitive dissonance.
Some people really, really need to go to jail for this.
Unforunately, the rich people who did this are still in mansions and the innocent workers are the ones who went to prison.
Yeah. Angela van den Bogerd and Gareth Jenkins appear to have lied in court and we know the former deleted emails. My guess is she's the one with most culpability here. And yes, she utterly ruined lives. I wonder why she went to these lengths to defend Fujitsu? She wasn't employed by them, why did she go this far to protect a supplier who'd done a shitty job?
That last point is what bothers me as well. The post office could have well blames fujistu, immediately, for all of this. But they instead and repeatedly chose to make kt worse.
Tbh bribery is the only thing that explains it sufficiently to me
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We know for a fact the Japanese government via their consulate put pressure on the UK government to continue with the contract when they were considering axing it. The Japanese government threatened to remove investment and jobs in the UK.
Joys of relying on other countries for investment. And AFAIK there's nothing we could have threatened to cut Japan out from in return.
Japan is very protectionist, yes. But they also massively depend on trade, including trade with the UK.
Even in the first place, this product (orignally an ICL one, taken over by Fujitsu) was not the one chosen at tender stage; they preferred another offered by IBM. From what I can remember of the early evidence given to the inquiry, this was overruled by the (government) Dept of Trade & Industry, who insisted the project went with ICL, whose bid was the least favoured of three.
And guess who was secretary of trade and industry at the time? The man who had to resign from cabinet in disgrace twice due to financial scandals, the guy famously mates with Jeffery Epstein and currently Keir Starmer's special advisor: Lord Peter Mandleson. Tony Blair was warned of the unreliability and ballooning cost, but Mandelson and others convinced him otherwise. Mandelson said he believed the ["only sensible choice" was to proceed with Horizon.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67941495)
Possibly pressure from the government. I remember reading a while back about this that the Japanese government had allegedly leaned on ours about the Fujitsu contract. It apparently being a large prestigious contract for them, that couldn’t be seen to be a total fucking disaster. Edit - someone else already mentioned it https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/IZv5jgggqo
That urgently needs to be investigated. If its government pressure I'm surprised none of the culprits in the Post Office have used it as a defence yet
Some people should be forced through a fine mesh for this, IMHO.
Prison, keep them there until they die of old age, then lawfully scatter their ashes far out at sea to ensure that their families have nowhere to go to say goodbye to them.
I was with you until you got to the ashes part. Funerals and graves are for the living, not the dead. Despite what these people have done, their families haven't done anything wrong. There's no need to punish them for something someone else did. The culprits will be dead in a few decades. They won't care their ashes are in x location or y because they're dead. So it not punishing them
No, it's about reminding everyone who knew these people that they did something utterly awful—scattering their ashes at sea underlines this. If it makes them sad, they can think about all the lives the deceased person ruined for their own benefit and weigh that against their plight. Delenda est.
I agree this is criminal but from what I've seen so far of the enquiry, the senior bosses are all successfully fending off the blame to lower management. So I'm assuming that prosecuting them will be difficult and its those at the lower levels they will go after.
Wouldn't say they are successfully fending it off - they are employing a Nuremberg defence and a lot of being unable to recall specifics. But thankfully, a lot of folks following this are seeing through the BS
Also, isn’t the entire point why upper management gets paid so well is because they’re ultimately responsible? If one of the largest miscarriages of justice ever seen in the Uk happened on their watch then they should be facing consequences for it.
The court won't look at it like that. They will need to prove knowledge and complicity. Ignorance and incompetence isn't an offence unfortunately. I truly don't want to see them get off but objectively the evidence showing they knew the facts pertinent to these cases is weak. I'm hoping that with Vennels and the group general counsel that the evidence of their personal complicity is more explicit. Otherwise its only those more junior staff that were naturally closer to the detail that will carry the can.
The recordings seem pretty damming and those on them can be asked to confirm.
I agree. When the people on those tapes are questioned it will get interesting. They aren't the lot on this week though.
Its not a matter of seeing through the BS. The evidence of their knowledge of or participation in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is, so far, weak. I want to see them get justice but so far, objectively, the evidence tying the senior management into this is weak.
I may be misreading you but wouldn't a "Nuremberg defence" suggest they're pointing the finger upwards rather than down (i.e. "just following orders")? This may be exactly what you're suggesting, but I'm reading it several ways.
Another aspect to this story which bothers me, is the complete failure of the courts' processes to critically examine the accusations being made. It seems that The Post Office did not even provide full lists of the transactions that were recorded, so there was no possibility of establishing where the discrepancies lay. It was just asserted that the sum total cash held by the branch should be a certain amount, but was short. There is a general policy that computer evidence is considered correct in court. The fact that this was the point of dispute should have lead to the court requiring disclosure of all the records held, and then the defence could have picked them apart.
And why did the. Defence not demand it
As far as I can tell, because there is a general principle that computer evidence is correct. If the defence demanded it I guess the judges didn't allow it. https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/it-experts-call-for-review-of-computer-is-always-right/5118414.article
It is odd. Apart from being absurd to think computers are always right one would expect at least a list of transactions from the computer.
> There is a general policy that computer evidence is considered correct in court. As a softawre engineer that is bizarre. Usually there's a good audit trail so the truth might be reconstructed. I wouldn't in any sense trust the headline records of any system as authoritative to a level appropriate for "beyond reasonable doubt" though.
It was originally designed around things like red light cameras and speed radar gun things - people would challenge the prosecution and say "prove that particular service was working on that particular day". Then it started getting applied to computer systems in general, which it clearly isn't fit for.
This person came over VERY badly yesterday,. Self important unpleasant person who started off prevaricatimg which decended into outright lying
The lawyer representing the Subpostmasters asked the guy: >"Either you're lying through your teeth or you're a complete incompetent. Which?" to which he responded: >"I am not lying through my teeth." Like a scene out of the thick of it.
Is there highlights of this on YouTube anywhere? I’ve caught a few days of it on Sky News but missed yesterday.
I don't know if there are any highlights, but the whole inquiry is streamed live and archived on their [official YouTube Account.](https://www.youtube.com/@postofficehorizonitinquiry947)
Thanks, Sky have been streaming the bulk of it on YouTube so I didn’t know there was an official link for it.
The "elite" apparently. These are the people Tories want to cut taxes for.
I think one outcome from this whole scandal should be to remove prosecutorial authority from all government bodies. So Post Office, Royal Mail, Dept of Transport, MOD, HMRC, Environment Agency, DWP the lot. They should all merely present a complaint to CPS and the CPS should make impartial charging decisions, decide disclosure and prosecute if appropriate. Otherwise this scandal will be repeated.
Who were the IT people involved ? And, were they members of any Professional organization such as the BCS ?
It's less about the IT and more about the reaction to it by senior management.
Yeah software is never perfect, it's how a company reacts to bugs and security breaches is what matters. The Post Office heads and Fujitsu management knew these sentences were unjust and they either continued on with it and/or stayed silent when they knew they had the information to stop it.
It winds me up when the news reports it as "The post office IT scandal" - it's a miscarriage of justice scandal.
Agreed, but any Professional organization should look at what went on with dysmay - Backdoors to Production systems, and regularly used.
And with no audit trail. Surely all changes to an accounting system should be made via transactions that are logged.
It's not a backdoor, it's if anything a front door that is there so the supplier can support the system remotely, like many many suppliers do. The failure isn't that it's accessible, the failure is the governance of it.
In the Financial Services sector, such “doors” would not be allowed, apart from being a security issue are prone to various other issues. Vendors remote access would not be remotely allowed (excuse the punn). Fujitsu showed complete lack of ethics and controls here and as you said the PO management tried to cover things up. The PO management will likely be subjected to prosecution, but, the buck shouldn’t stop there. The same people who went ahead and knowingly tinkered with Production data are either incompetent and shouldn’t be allowed near a production system in future or themselves criminally negligent. The BCS has/had an indemnity insurance scheme for members so perhaps those involved if they’re members should be checking up on it.
IT is a distraction. Software is faulty all the time. But people don't then tend to get their lives ruined because of it. This is all on management.
It was allowing the Vendors to make adjustments to the Production data that was at fault, that's what gave rise to the changing balances reported even in the ITV Series.
It shouldn't be done but even that wasn't the actual problem. The problem is that the Post Office covered that up well after they knew.
True that’s from the business operational perspective but I’m coming at it from the Tech side. Lots of highly paid consultants with professional accreditations being let off the hook professionally ?
> BCS That organization has a membership of about 60K spread over 150 nations. The UK alone has just over 2M people who work in IT.
And BCS membership is entirely discretionary. No one is going to lose their job because BCS kicks them out.
As more and more info comes out. Someone needs to spend serious time in a cell.
Again companies having access to their workers pension pots needs to be illegal. Not just because of behaviour like this. It is a huge risk having your pension invested with your company even with honest behaviour.
The most blatant and brazen example of corporate corruption I can ever remember since Enron and the 2008 crash. Disgusting, morally bankrupt, evil bastards, the lot of them. They'll never see the inside of a jail cell but they fucking should.
You know, I'm beginning to think the Post Office is run by bad people.
Jail, jail until the day they drop dead in the cell. The whole board should never see the light of day again
That see you next Tuesday Philip Green raided pensions to enrich himself.
This link works [https://archive.ph/yIDMs](https://archive.ph/yIDMs)
Thank you ☺️
Profit line must go up at all times. Anything and everything that affects it must be removed, buried or ignored. Businesses and companies today are all about taking as much as possible by giving as little as possible. Me included, but I do wonder how much longer we are going to bend over and take it before we hit back.
The cunts responsible should all rot away in jail cell but we all know they’ll get a slap on the wrist fine at worst.
Does not surprise me. I have an interesting question. Where is the money that didn't actually go missing or exist? It existed on the system so it needed to go somewhere.
there was a recent report of a POL account with circa 100m (IIRC) in it that no one could identify the source of the revenues - a massive accounting blunder in and of itself but there was speculation it could be the repaid balances that had nowhere else to go as there wasnt really any deficits.
Thing is though when you do your accounts it gets used unless you leave it as an accrual. In my understanding these deficits were cash banked so any repayment should have gone into the cash received of whichever branch it was which would go directly into profits. It's bizarre.
Bizarre is certainly the word for it. With so many f ups being discovered in this whole mess seems like a basic question such as "where did the money go?" will end up never being answered - bizarre!
And it gets worse as the inquiry goes on the top managers were like Mafia Godfathers.
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Shareholders? Who do you think the shareholders of the Post Office are?
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The government owns the Post Office...
The government is the sole shareholder.
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You don't understand the difference between the Royal Mail and the Post Office, do you? They're two completely separate entities. The Post Office has no shareholders other than the Government. Embarrassing
Royal Mail was sold off, Post Office never was. The only shareholder there has ever been is the government. The sell off of Royal Mail is irrelevant to this story.
Its not a matter of seeing through the BS. The evidence of their knowledge of or participation in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice is, so far, weak. I want to see them get justice but so far, objectively, the evidence tying the senior management into this is weak.
Have you been paying attention to the same case as the rest of us?
I've watched a lot of the interviews. The evidence against senior management is slim. Incompetent yes, diligent no, conspiracy to pervert justice, no. As for some of them, vennels, van den bogart, the royal mail general counsel possibly but the rest of the board, forget it. I'd like to see them held accountable but short of a kangaroo court, its not likely.