Post Office scandal

[badgerx16]

From the BBC coverage;

"The inquiry has moved onto questions from Ed Henry KC, a lawyer for a group of sub-postmasters.

Henry refers to an e-mail chain that shows that, as early as July 2013, the Post Office was drafting a letter to its insurers to notify them of potential issues with Horizon.

The chain shows one of the Post Office's lawyers expressing a concern that, "from a PR perspective, it would look bad if this got into the public domain".'"

[Gloucester Saint]

Sickening https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68760215

I don’t agree that the compensation scheme and robust prosecutions and asset confiscation of the suspected fraudulent parties can’t happen in parallel. It’ll need a cross-agency team to do it but it is possible. 

Here’s some arrests and confiscation of assets to kick things off on the Post Office side - Vennells, Cook, Greene, Smith, Roberts, Mills https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68452842#:~:text=Adam Crozier%2C Royal Mail chief executive 2003-2010&text=From 2003 to 2009 the,Crozier didn't sit on.

Fujitsu can make good on its promise to fund a significant chunk of the £1bn fund unless they want their UK leadership team in a police car as well.

[rooney]

I believe David Mills has passed away.

[Gloucester Saint]

9 hours ago, rooney said:

I believe David Mills has passed away.

Looks like it although not confirmed anywhere obvious.

Vennells is in an increasingly difficult position, only a matter of time before a clear case of perjury arises and certainly fraudulent activity and claims https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68779080 and 

The arrest needs to happen immediately after she’s given evidence to the enquiry and her movements should be heavily monitored and assets frozen. 

Two Fujitsu UK employees already under investigation for it and that will be a custodial sentence. Enjoy the porridge Gareth and be careful around the showers https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/09/computer-expert-silent-post-office-scandal/

[Gloucester Saint]

Wow, Alan Cook, the PO Director at the time, claims he didn’t know the PO was doing most of its own prosecuting. I mean you wouldn’t expect him to know minutiae of counter processes and ops detail, but top level remit including powers should be an absolute minimum. 

Crozier up this afternoon. He has so far held a ‘nothing to do with me guv’ stance, being CEO of the Royal Mail umbrella at the time. Wouldn’t expect him to be in the detail but to write off all responsibility? Hmmm. As he’s only got an afternoon grilling and Vennells has 3 days next month (she was in the detail tbf) he’s probably going to get away Scot free (no pun intended). Nothing to do with his ITV role and connections in an election year….

Edited April 12 by Gloucester Saint
CEO

[trousers]

45 minutes ago, Gloucester Saint said:

Wow, Alan Cook, the PO Director at the time, claims he didn’t know the PO was doing most of its own prosecuting. I mean you wouldn’t expect him to know minutiae of counter processes and ops detail, but top level remit including powers should be an absolute minimum. 

Crozier up this afternoon. He has so far held a ‘nothing to do with me guv’ stance, being CEO of the Royal Mail umbrella at the time. Wouldn’t expect him to be in the detail but to write off all responsibility? Hmmm. As he’s only got an afternoon grilling and Vennells has 3 days next month (she was in the detail tbf) he’s probably going to get away Scot free (no pun intended). Nothing to do with his ITV role and connections in an election year….

Yeah, jaw dropping that Cook is saying that he was obvious to POL's ability to trigger criminal prosecutions, especially given he's also saying how fastidious and involved he was with the business as a whole.

Re: Crozier... It's funny how leaders are quick to give themselves, and their fellow board members, a pat on the back when things go well in an organisation, yet suddenly become blissfully ignorant of what's going on when things go pear shaped... 

Edited April 12 by trousers

[trousers]

Crozier just thrown Cook under the bus by saying he's "surprised" that Cook supposedly didn't know that the Post Office had a prosecutorial capability...

[badgerx16]

Adam Crozier; "Whatever the difficulties, if people genuinely felt there were problems, they should have said something.'

 

They did, Adam, but they were then accused of lying and sent to prison.

[trousers]

On 10/04/2024 at 08:03, rooney said:

I believe David Mills has passed away.

They've just announced Mills is appearing before the enquiry next Tuesday...

[trousers]

13 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

Adam Crozier; "Whatever the difficulties, if people genuinely felt there were problems, they should have said something.'

 

They did, Adam, but they were then accused of lying and sent to prison.

I'd prefer that last lawyer to ask all the questions...he's much more direct and feisty!

[rooney]

53 minutes ago, trousers said:

They've just announced Mills is appearing before the enquiry next Tuesday...

Thanks Trousers. I must have been confused with John Mills😀

[badgerx16]

 

[rooney]

That's really damning. The world knows that these senior managers in the PO have lied and surely there is enough evidence now to convict them. If the authorities will not do that, Alan Bates has said he will bring a private prosecution against them for Perverting the Course of Justice.

[trousers]

Bogard's demeanor at the select committee exuded suspicion so I'm not surprised there's seemingly evidence that she was deliberately covering things up. She certainly came across as a nasty piece of work on the ITV drama, although she obviously refuted that characterisation of course. 

Looks like she has a nice house. Would be a shame if she ended up in prison and lost that...

[trousers]

6 hours ago, rooney said:

That's really damning. The world knows that these senior managers in the PO have lied and surely there is enough evidence now to convict them. If the authorities will not do that, Alan Bates has said he will bring a private prosecution against them for Perverting the Course of Justice.

Given the Post Office still have the power to prosecute (I assume?) maybe they should instigate criminal proceedings? What a delightful irony that would be.... 

Edited April 15 by trousers

[Gloucester Saint]

What really comes across from all of the sordid correspondence within PO is the second class (no pun intended) attitude towards the sub-postmasters eg ‘subbies with their hand in the till’ compared to long-serving PO employees in Crown Offices, as effectively the former are/were self-employed franchise holders, albeit with a grotesquely one-sided contract which was used as a blunt instrument to say ‘Horizon is perfect, these are your losses and you need to make them good’.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/post-office-horizon-it-scandal-b2527686.html

If you are following the enquiry, I recommend Nick Wallis’s book the Great Post Office Scandal - £6.99 on Kindle currently. Nick was one of the first journalists to take the story up. No, I‘m not him!

Some of the detail is staggering, and how long this has taken to come to the surface due to the PO’s stalling on evidence requests, blocking and outright lies. By the time Jo Swinson was Minister, the truth was starting to come out with increasing pressure from a cross-party group of MPs including Arbuthnot, Bridgen, Kevan Jones, Mike Wood, Albert Owen and Mike Wood. Her responses were pathetic, she was as useless as she was a Lib Dem leader. 

This led to the BIS enquiry of 2015 - where the POs lawyers and brown-nosing NFSP (subbies National Federation) tried to claim that a 500 page manual without any in-person or even online training was sufficient to be deemed certified to use Horizon in just one day. Alan Bates and Mark Baker ripped this apart, making clear the PO’s unwillingness to drill down into each and every kind of discrepancy. The Branch Focus manuals which came around branches Bates also exposed as inadequate, and when the PO’s lawyer tried to hit back by saying that losses only seemed to happen in sub-master controlled branches and not Crown Offices (that bias coming out again) Bates came back with a beauty of an internal report showing that Crown Offices lost £2.2m across their counters during 2007/8 at the peak of Horizon issues. The Second Sight review, which was highly critical of Horizon’s reliability and PO leadership and middle management, was being undermined politically. 

A system which had nearly 20000 fixes to its codes by the way so the system was different each time you used it. How the PO Board went in September 1999 from saying Horizon was miles off being operational to approving it the following month I will never understand but the enquiry must find that out from those still alive.

I’m at the point in the book at the BIS hearing where Zahawi is tearing Vennells a new one about the PO stalling on giving Second Signt access to the legal files, which might ring a bell from Mr Bates v the Post Office and her colleagues are tripping themselves up about who had/hadn’t given Second Sight what had been requested and continued denying Parliament details of all of the other wrong prosecutions which had happened.

Edited April 15 by Gloucester Saint

[Whitey Grandad]

5 hours ago, rooney said:

That's really damning. The world knows that these senior managers in the PO have lied and surely there is enough evidence now to convict them. If the authorities will not do that, Alan Bates has said he will bring a private prosecution against them for Perverting the Course of Justice.

Can a private individual do that?

[Fan The Flames]

8 hours ago, Whitey Grandad said:

Can a private individual do that?

Private prosecutions can be brought by any individual or any company under section 6(1) Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 and proceed in the same way as any prosecution brought by the Crown.

https://www.rahmanravelli.co.uk/expertise/private-prosecutions/private-prosecutions-guide/#:~:text=Private prosecutions can be brought,prosecution brought by the Crown.

[badgerx16]

Sam Stein, lawyer for some of the sub-postmasters, to David Miller, former PO director in charge of Horizon;

"You are either lying through your teeth or incompetent"'

"I'm not lying through my teeth"'

"'Then you are incompetent"

[badgerx16]

Chap currently giving evidence:

"We didn't consult the known error logs in relation to prosecutions because we might have had to disclose them. Once the litigation was concluded our duty of disclosure no longer applied."

[Weston Super Saint]

26 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

Chap currently giving evidence:

"We didn't consult the known error logs in relation to prosecutions because we might have had to disclose them. Once the litigation was concluded our duty of disclosure no longer applied."

Remind me, how are people still not in prison for this blatant abuse?

[Fan The Flames]

37 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

Chap currently giving evidence:

"We didn't consult the known error logs in relation to prosecutions because we might have had to disclose them. Once the litigation was concluded our duty of disclosure no longer applied."

That's unbelievable, so they chose to not look at the error logs because there was a good chance that it could have undermind their case.

Any normal public organisation would take that as a signal that what they're doing was wrong. But the PO chose, probably incrementally, to preserve the integrity of the organisation by upholding a pretense that the subbies were all bent.

[Weston Super Saint]

20 minutes ago, Fan The Flames said:

That's unbelievable, so they chose to not look at the error logs because there was a good chance that it could have undermind their case.

Any normal public organisation would take that as a signal that what they're doing was wrong. But the PO chose, probably incrementally, to preserve the integrity of the organisation by upholding a pretense that the subbies were all bent.

I'm assuming the error logs were asked for, so I wonder what excuse they gave for not providing them?

[badgerx16]

1 hour ago, Weston Super Saint said:

I'm assuming the error logs were asked for, so I wonder what excuse they gave for not providing them?

You can only ask for them if you know they exist, so if the PO didn't reference them the subbies hadn't a clue. There has been previous evidence that FUJITSU hid certain parts of the error reporting system from the PO.

Edited April 18 by badgerx16

[Holmes_and_Watson]

Paraphrasing (slightly) a sub-postmaster on the radio this morning.

"If I had to spend time in prison, for things where there was no evidence of wrong doing and that I hadn't done, why should these people not spend time in prison where there is ample evidence of wrong doing and that they definitely have done."

[badgerx16]

3 hours ago, Weston Super Saint said:

Remind me, how are people still not in prison for this blatant abuse?

Paula Vennels is close to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[Sergei Gotsmanov]

I recently spoke to a student and her work has been checked by software that found that an assignment she had done was 24% completed using AI and punished by being docked 15 marks. She has never used AI but because the software has ruled against her she cannot contest it. She is still on course for a first so her attitude is to reluctantly not make a fuss. Her tutor believes her but there is no course of appeal. Even after Horizon we are still allowing computers to make unchecked judgments. It is scary.

[trousers]

5 hours ago, Weston Super Saint said:

Remind me, how are people still not in prison for this blatant abuse?

Assume the CPS needs to wait for the inquiry to conclude before it can step in? That said, I'm inclined to wager a large sum of money that these scumbags will get away with it scot free on some kind of technicality or legal loop hole.

[trousers]

On 16/04/2024 at 15:08, badgerx16 said:

Sam Stein, lawyer for some of the sub-postmasters, to David Miller, former PO director in charge of Horizon;

"You are either lying through your teeth or incompetent"'

"I'm not lying through my teeth"'

"'Then you are incompetent"

Love that Stein fella... Doesn't mince his words!

[benjii]

14 hours ago, Sergei Gotsmanov said:

I recently spoke to a student and her work has been checked by software that found that an assignment she had done was 24% completed using AI and punished by being docked 15 marks. She has never used AI but because the software has ruled against her she cannot contest it. She is still on course for a first so her attitude is to reluctantly not make a fuss. Her tutor believes her but there is no course of appeal. Even after Horizon we are still allowing computers to make unchecked judgments. It is scary.

That's illegal. You have a right to object to automated decisions taken using your personal data and to have them manually reviewed.

[Sergei Gotsmanov]

43 minutes ago, benjii said:

That's illegal. You have a right to object to automated decisions taken using your personal data and to have them manually reviewed.

That is not what she was told. She will make the fuss after the results have been published because she does not want to upset the apple cart.

[Fan The Flames]

Something similar happened down here, a course folded mid way through and students were taken on by a neighbouring uni. The coursework they had submitted previously had been put through the plagiarism machine, so they had to submit new coursework otherwise it would have got a 100% plagiarism score. Seems crazy if true.

[trousers]

Susan Crichton, POL's Head of Legal at the time, has a conveniently sketchy memory of events.... You'd have thought someone with that level of legal acumen would have an exemplary memory...

[trousers]

Meanwhile.... 😂

 

[badgerx16]

I reckon there is a higher rate of memory loss amongst senior PO staff than you would find in a dementia ward.

[trousers]

9 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

I reckon there is a higher rate of memory loss amongst senior PO staff than you would find in a dementia ward.

Crichton now can't remember sending a key email whilst on holiday in Croatia. Yep, that's exactly the sort of thing that you wouldn't remember doing whilst on holiday.... 🤦‍♂️

[trousers]

I hope the two rottweiler core participant lawyers get to interrogate this woman later. This enquiry fella is a tad soft.

[trousers]

[badgerx16]

Theme song for the enquiry ?

 

[trousers]

55 minutes ago, badgerx16 said:

Theme song for the enquiry ?

 

This van bogard woman being a case in point. Not sure how they're all managing to keep a straight face. 

[trousers]

Another candidate...

 

 

[whelk]

First time I have watched any of the enquiriy live. Very interesting and like the cut of the KC’s jib.

‘Word soup’ and fuck me ‘out of my knowledge scope’

Alhough heart breaking hearing about the postmaster who killed himself and the poor family. A very honest bloke driven to it solely by these cunts and what is worse is that they clearly knew it was wrong.

[Gloucester Saint]

What a surprise (not) that Van Den Bogard is a People Services & Change Director eg operational senior HR. ‘Defending the Post Office line’, aggressive tactics 1-1, economical with the truth, happy to drive a coach and horses through the law, agitating for expensive restructures which halve efficiency, only interested in defending the exec’s backside and yet the memory of a 120 year old when challenged. Yet lots of nice talk about caring for people with mental health issues, EDI, celebrate this day, that day, whilst hundreds of innocent people were incarcerated, lives destroyed and tragically some took their own. 

It’ll be the same outcome it is always is with that profession (fully qualified in it but happier to not be in it any longer), lots of muscular upwards talk ‘yeah, let’s kick the crap out of those dishonest subbies/staff’, go totally OTT, ignore the processes and policies they are responsible for which even then are based on the worst expected view of people, be exposed as unreasonable (which has taken far too long with this scandal) and end up either having to settle a botched case for double what it should be if they’d been reasonable, or worse still like here, getting torn a new arsehole and found to be suppressing evidence at an enquiry or employment tribunal.

https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-inquiry-latest-apology-meaningless-without-accountability-former-sub-postmaster-says-as-ex-executive-faces-questions-13122120

I’ll exclude the HR Org Development people from the above as they’ve got an independent brain and you can actually have a realistic conversation with them. The senior HR Ops people and partners have made so many fuck ups in the different places I’ve worked costing eye watering sums in all sectors and always defended the indefensible, this being an extreme on the scale but very similar behaviourally to what I’ve observed. They avoid me these days as they know I’m like Neil Warnock with referees!

Edited Saturday at 08:58 by Gloucester Saint