Post Office Scandal - Disgrace

[FANG]

How the hell was this allowed to affect the lives of 557 post workers and continue for so long.

Surely one of the IT guys would have sussed this issue fairly quickly.

Why did the management take the action they did and draw it out for many years.

Should they now face justice and what punishment applied - Jail or fines.

Or will the tax payer face the bill. 

Ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells goes to ground amid scandal | Daily Mail Online

 

  

 

[sta100]

3 minutes ago, FANG said:

How the hell was this allowed to affect the lives of 557 post workers and continue for so long.

Surely one of the IT guys would have sussed this issue fairly quickly.

Why did the management take the action they did and draw it out for many years.

Should they now face justice and what punishment applied - Jail or fines.

Or will the tax payer face the bill. 

Ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells goes to ground amid scandal | Daily Mail Online

 

  

 

Venells needs to be tried on manslaughter charges

[Si1]

I knew a bloke about 5 years ago who had previously been a supervisor at either the post office or royal mail and said the management culture was evil, and closely in bed with the union management. He said they'd rather see someone die than their own mistakes be shown up.

[Si1]

It's shocking:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252493199/Post-Office-IT-scandal-CEO-Paula-Vennells-jumps-NHS-ship-as-pressure-mounts

"Late last month, during a hearing of subpostmaster cases in the Court of Appeal, the existence of a document emerged, which allegedly proves the Post Office was advised by one of its own barristers that its expert witnesses, in the prosecutions of subpostmasters, failed to give information that could have undermined prosecutions The disclosure, which has not been made public, is from a barrister, Simon Clarke, to the Post Office about evidence given by an expert witness in the trials.

 

Conservative peer James Arbuthnot recently said the document could reveal that the Post Office “lied to, and was in contempt of, Parliament” during a previous inquiry into the scandal.

 

Following Vennells’ resignation, he said: “Can it be a coincidence that shortly after it became clear that the Post Office lied to Parliament, Paula Vennells announced she was stepping down from the NHS job?”

 

Alexander said: “It seems, from the sequence of events, that the current Court of Appeal proceedings, revelations of a barrister’s advice previously undisclosed by the Post Office and Lord Arbuthnot’s related contention that the Post Office lied and misled Parliament may have been important in the announcement of Paula Vennells’ departure.”

 

Separately, a former Post Office executive criticised by Fraser in his judgements,r Angela van den Bogerd, has landed a new job. Van den Bogerd left the Post Office quietly and, according to BBC Wales, was last week named “head of people” by the Football Association of Wales.

 

She faced detailed questioning during the trial. When Fraser handed down his 300-page judgment on 15 March 2019, he said: “There were two specific matters where [Van den Bogerd] did not give me frank evidence, and sought to obfuscate matters, and mislead me.”

 

Meanwhile, subpostmaster victims of the scandal are still trying to rebuild their lives and are still fighting for justice on many fronts. They were awarded £57.5m in damages, but after legal costs were taken out, they were left with just £11m between them. The JFSA is demanding that the government pay the legal costs to leave victims with a fairer settlement, but the government has refused. One claimant who was wrongly sent to prison, which left her life in tatters, received just £9,000 compensation."

[FANG]

Si1

They should be hung and their assets sold and distributed amongst the accused.  

[Si1]

Wasn't the former chairman of the Co-Op bank, who oversaw major losses, also a religious minister? Funny connection.

Paul Flowers.

[highcontrast]

Thanks for posting this @FANG, deserves higlighting for anyone who missed it. But yes, astonishing cover up by the PO and also the developers of the "Horizon" software, Fujitsu, who knew the code was full of bugs and causing errors. They were both ok with innocent people being prosecuted and potentially going to jail, rather than trying to fix the issue.

I think a lot of this case was down to Computerweekly(?) investigating the code itself and whistleblower i think?

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496560/Fujitsu-bosses-knew-about-Post-Office-Horizon-IT-flaws-says-insider

Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider

A former senior developer who worked for Fujitsu on the Post Office IT system that led to subpostmasters being falsely accused of fraud, has claimed bosses knew of fundamental flaws before going live

 

N.b. Fujitsu also developed the NHS data system around the same time! I'm not sure if it is still in use now though? Anyone?

On my local news, one of the victims who had a feeling that the software was the issue, was told that no-one else had issues, shocking.

As mentioned by news media, one of the biggest miscarriges of justice, ever. I can  honestly say i was choking up when i saw the reports about this last week.

P.s. I reckon this will be made into film, i just hope the profits go to the victims

[highcontrast]

https://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/community/viewtopic.php?t=99619

Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider

• Quote

Post by TrueBlueTerrier » 19 Feb 2021, 10:15

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252 ... ys-insider

The Post Office’s Horizon IT system should “never have seen the light of day” and bosses at supplier Fujitsu allowed it to be rolled out into the Post Office network despite being told it was not fit for purpose, according to a senior developer who worked on the project before it went live.

Horizon is the system at the heart of the scandal that saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly accused of fraud and false accounting until a 2019 High Court case proved the Post Office IT was at fault. Horizon is a counter-top sales and accounting system, commissioned by the government to automate Post Office services. It went live in Post Office branches in 1999 and an updated version is still in use today.

The developer, who has not previously talked publicly about his experiences on the project, told Computer Weekly that in the months leading up to its launch, Horizon’s problems were well known inside Fujitsu.

“Everybody in the building by the time I got there knew it was a bag of s**t”, he said. “It had gone through the test labs God knows how many times, and the testers were raising bugs by the thousand.”

The senior developer said he was contracted to work on the Horizon project between 1998 and 2000, at one point holding the job title Horizon Epos [electronic point of sale] development manager. He has asked to remain anonymous, but is prepared to give sworn witness statements to solicitors acting for subpostmasters in their ongoing appeals against past convictions.

The developer has also asked Computer Weekly to pass his contact details to the government’s Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, chaired by former High Court judge Wyn Williams.

Central to his allegation is that Horizon’s Epos system was initially built with “no design documents, no test documents, no peer reviews, no code reviews, no coding standards”.

[winkie]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j

Shocking can be Jailed as a criminal without police or CPS involvement.

[frrich11]

19 hours ago, FANG said:

How the hell was this allowed to affect the lives of 557 post workers and continue for so long.

Surely one of the IT guys would have sussed this issue fairly quickly.

Why did the management take the action they did and draw it out for many years.

Should they now face justice and what punishment applied - Jail or fines.

Or will the tax payer face the bill. 

Ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells goes to ground amid scandal | Daily Mail Online

Sometimes I like to gamble and by this time I didn't see a better place to gamble than minnesota casino arcturustelecom.com with it's promotions and events.

 

  

 

That's a giant mess, they have to go to jail!

[winkie]

See cladding scandal...... leaseholders should not have to pay a penny.

[Si1]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10486039/Post-Office-chairman-Tim-Parker-QUITS-week-inquiry-opens-scandal.html

"The Post Office chairman who was known as the 'Prince of Darkness' due to his alleged zeal for embarking on job cuts has stepped down just days before the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is due to begin. 

 

Along with the then chief executive Paula Vennells, who was in charge of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, Mr Parker agreed to the strategy of aggressively pursuing postmasters through the courts. "

[Si1]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10745819/Wrongly-convicted-subpostmasters-awaiting-compensation-one-year-on.html

Post Office staff who were wrongly prosecuted in Horizon IT scandal say they are NO closer to receiving compensation

[Sour Mash]

This whole Horizon affair is a morass of murkiness ... I suspect there's a rotting world of corruption and coverup bubbling under the surface.

[Si1]

On 16/05/2022 at 12:57, Sour Mash said:

This whole Horizon affair is a morass of murkiness ... I suspect there's a rotting world of corruption and coverup bubbling under the surface.

Oh look. Some victims were never told of the compensation scheme and have missed the window to apply...

 

The Guardian: Post Office IT scandal victims may be disqualified from compensation scheme.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/21/post-office-it-scandal-victims-may-be-disqualified-from-compensation-scheme

 

 

[msi]

On 16/05/2022 at 12:57, Sour Mash said:

This whole Horizon affair is a morass of murkiness ... I suspect there's a rotting world of corruption and coverup bubbling under the surface.

Horizon was delivered by Private sector IT - remind me how wonderful and transparent the private sector is

[FANG]

[cnick]

36 minutes ago, FANG said:

Luckily we have a democratic system so we can vote to stop this kind of thing.

[danlee74]

On 26/04/2021 at 18:57, FANG said:

their assets sold and distributed amongst the accused.  

+1

[Sour Mash]

20 hours ago, msi said:

Horizon was delivered by Private sector IT - remind me how wonderful and transparent the private sector is

 

However, the scandal is actually because the Post Office insisted that the software was perfect (an impossibility) and the only possible reason could be thieving postmasters ... and abused their prosecutorial powers to strongarm them.

Clearly something going on behind closed doors there.

 

[Si1]

1 hour ago, Sour Mash said:

 

However, the scandal is actually because the Post Office insisted that the software was perfect (an impossibility) and the only possible reason could be thieving postmasters ... and abused their prosecutorial powers to strongarm them.

Clearly something going on behind closed doors there.

 

It's astonishing that the senior management KNEW there were multiple cases of these identical accounting irregularities yet pushed hard to prosecute the postmasters for fraud despite the fact that the systemic nature of the irregularities made identical individual frauds on this scale vanishingly unlikely. I am utterly flabbergasted. The bare faced audacity of the reverend Paula "wisdom of Solomon" Vennels et al is just horrifying.

[iamnumerate]

13 minutes ago, Si1 said:

It's astonishing that the senior management KNEW there were multiple cases of these identical accounting irregularities yet pushed hard to prosecute the postmasters for fraud despite the fact that the systemic nature of the irregularities made identical individual frauds on this scale vanishingly unlikely. I am utterly flabbergasted. The bare faced audacity of the reverend Paula "wisdom of Solomon" Vennels et al is just horrifying.

I think that some post office staff might have commited perjury. If I had been on trial for fraud, I would have got my barrister to ask if anyone else had had similar problems. If that happened,then surely someone must have committed perjury.

 

The compensation is not enough personally I think that it should be at leat £8K pcm in prison and say £2K for every month that someone is walking about with a wrongful conviction.

Plus more for any costs etc so if someone lost their house in 2001 - they should get compensation.

If neccesarry the post office should be privatized to pay for it. As a tax payer I don't like the idea but people should get fair compensation.

 

[Sour Mash]

31 minutes ago, Si1 said:

It's astonishing that the senior management KNEW there were multiple cases of these identical accounting irregularities yet pushed hard to prosecute the postmasters for fraud despite the fact that the systemic nature of the irregularities made identical individual frauds on this scale vanishingly unlikely. I am utterly flabbergasted. The bare faced audacity of the reverend Paula "wisdom of Solomon" Vennels et al is just horrifying.

When you have a large organisation that is all-but public sector and holds some exceptional legal powers, it's almost inevitable that you will see said organisation abusing their position with the attitude that they can get away with anything (and nearly did).

Even so, It's baffling why they tried to pin the blame on their Postmasters rather than pursuing the people who supplied their software/systems.  Maybe the temptation to use the threat of prosecution against the little guy was more cost efficient?  And they were able to use their institutional power to actually successfully pursue convictions when people did stand up.

 

 

[Si1]

14 minutes ago, iamnumerate said:

I think that some post office staff might have commited perjury. If I had been on trial for fraud, I would have got my barrister to ask if anyone else had had similar problems. If that happened,then surely someone must have committed perjury.

Do we know how it first got recognised by the victims as systemic? Who found out?

14 minutes ago, iamnumerate said:

 

The compensation is not enough personally I think that it should be at leat £8K pcm in prison and say £2K for every month that someone is walking about with a wrongful conviction.

Plus more for any costs etc so if someone lost their house in 2001 - they should get compensation.

Agreed. I cannot see how senior management involved in the post office can't face significant prison time for this too. It would seem extremely unjust if their lives weren't utterly ruined like they ruined others, at a minimum. I like the way the Welsh FA immediately dismissed a Post Office senior exec from their own executive board when it came to light. It's so dirty.

14 minutes ago, iamnumerate said:

If neccesarry the post office should be privatized to pay for it. As a tax payer I don't like the idea but people should get fair compensation.

 

 

[Si1]

5 minutes ago, Sour Mash said:

When you have a large organisation that is all-but public sector and holds some exceptional legal powers, it's almost inevitable that you will see said organisation abusing their position with the attitude that they can get away with anything (and nearly did).

Even so, It's baffling why they tried to pin the blame on their Postmasters rather than pursuing the people who supplied their software/systems.  Maybe the temptation to use the threat of prosecution against the little guy was more cost efficient?  And they were able to use their institutional power to actually successfully pursue convictions when people did stand up.

 

 

One word - power.