upgraded to a statutory enquiry(after the govt were given a bit of chinese burn) so that the POst Office liars can be compelled to tell the truth and hopefully do time for perverting the course of justice
did read an article in sunday times, couple of fujitsu employees wont have slept well for a few weeks.
that's what m alluding too, appears 2 fujitsu reps/employees have lied under oath i.e knew there were faults and system could be manipulated/flawed.
I have not read the article you refer to, but I do know in these sorts of cases very big barristers are employed at major expense and basically they all start throwing mud at each other and everybody says they know nothing but them blames everyone else for not telling them issues and they were assured ... etc
aye, also in the article was mentioned a visit by a po employee to fujitsu to see new software etc, this employee actually ended up as one of the jailed ones and po/fujitsu denied the visit ever happened
.
The National Federation of Sub Postmasters also need to be held to account for not backing up their members basically leaving the accused PMs out on a limb. Disgraceful.The Fujitsu expert appeared at multiple trials across the country, and the 'weight of expert evidence' became one that the judges eventually went with - "well he was right in 10 other cases, so he must be right here"
There's a fuller timeline in ComputerWeekly who first raised it in 2009 - if you can scrool to the end you can see how it developed, the following article has a massive list of issues highlighted by that publication alone since 2009
Post Office scandal CEO steps down from roles after massive miscarriage of justice is laid bare | Computer Weekly
Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has left roles in the church, Morrisons and Dunelm after postmasters’ convictions were overturned in the Court of Appeal.www.computerweekly.com
Edit:
Seema Misra, the lady who went to jail while pregnant, had her lawyers questioning the computer system in November 2009 during her trial
A couple of examples of cases that went against people:Post Office theft case deferred over IT questions | Computer Weekly
Lee Castleton, Bridlington, Yorkshire
Lee Castleton, 40, was postmaster at the Bridlington post office in east Yorkshire. His problems started in January 2004, and he claimed he couldn’t get help from the Post Office.
“Mis-balances continued for 12 weeks. I spent hours going through accounts, trying to find out what had happened. It was baffling,” he said.
Castleton rang the Horizon helpdesk, which is run by the Post Office, and asked repeatedly for help and a system check, but he said they did very little.
After 12 weeks, Castleton was suspended and the Post Office told him he had to pay for the losses. “I decided to contest my obligation to pay the money in the civil court, because I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said.
Castleton could not afford lawyers in the High Court, or pay an IT expert witness to look at the system logs for him. He argued that the discrepancy in his accounts had been created by the computer. But the judge said that the deficiencies were real, not illusory, and, as such, were evidence that the branch had not been managed properly. “The losses must have been caused by his own error or that of his assistants,” the judgment said.
Under their contract with the Post Office, postmasters are liable for any losses that are due to carelessness, negligence or error. Castleton was also liable for the company’s legal costs.
“The Post Office really put me through the mangle,” he said. “I owed £27,000 for the deficits, and £321,000 altogether. I was in too deep – I see that now. The whole thing has been heartbreaking.”
Noel Thomas, Gaerwen, Anglesey
Noel Thomas, 61, from Anglesey, worked for the Post Office for 42 years. His problems started in 2003, when he discovered a deficit of £6,000. He said he spent hours looking at it, trying to find out what was wrong.
He said the Post Office paid half of the deficit for him, and he paid the other half. He didn’t have any more problems until 2004.
“It started up again all of a sudden. The money was going at a rate of £2,000 a month, and it went on until October 2005. The last figure they told me I owed was £50,000.
“The National Federation of Sub-Postmasters didn’t want to know. It is frustrating – I would like to know where that money went to. The whole thing is a real mess,” he said.
Faced with mounting deficits and nowhere to turn for help, Thomas signed the accounts to say the money was there, when it wasn’t. “I didn’t know what else to do. It was my biggest mistake – I should have turned round and told them I was shutting up shop until they found out what was going on. But at the time I thought they would close the Post Office if I did that, and that would cause a problem for the village.”
The Post Office prosecuted Thomas for false accounting. He pleaded guilty and said the IT system didn’t come up during his hearing – his barrister told the judge about his good character.
Mark Jenner, who at the time was the director of fraud investigation at accountancy firm Baker Tilly, said in a report prepared in advance of the case that he did not propose that the Horizon system was flawed. “If the Horizon system was flawed, I would expect to see issues raised by all 14,000 branches in the UK and not only a handful,” he said.
But Jenner had been unable to examine the computer terminal used in Thomas’s branch. “To completely discount the possibility that the Gaerwen branch terminal was not responsible for creating systematic and cumulative errors, I would still wish to inspect the terminal,” he said.
Jenner’s report was produced before the court hearing, when Thomas expected to face charges of theft. It was not used in the hearing because the theft charges were dropped.
Thomas was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. “I spent my 60th birthday in there,” he said. “It was hell on earth and it took me a long time to get over it.”
Judge Fraser in his summing up in 2019, after which he referred teh whole matter to the Criminal Cases Review Commission
In his latest judgment, Fraser said the Post Office had exhibited “a simple institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon, which was maintained regardless of the weight of factual evidence to the contrary”.
He added: “That approach by the Post Office was continued, even though now there is also considerable expert evidence to the contrary as well, and much of it agreed expert evidence on the existence of numerous bugs.
“This approach by the Post Office has amounted, in reality, to bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred, at least so far as the witnesses called before me in the Horizon issues trial are concerned. It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat.”
Fraser said evidence of particular problems with Horizon, from claimant and defendant witnesses, had helped him to reach his conclusions. “I found some of the factual evidence to be of great assistance,” he said. “That of Mr Roll [former Fujitsu whistleblower] and Mr Godeseth [Fujitsu chief architect on the Post Office account] was extremely useful.
“The latter, one of the Post Office’s main witnesses, was sufficiently damaging to the Post Office’s case on the Horizon issues that they were, essentially, forced almost to disavow him, and the Post Office’s closing submissions were highly critical of the accuracy of his evidence.”
Cheers pal, I’ll have I listen over the weekend, reading back through the thread and it’s still making me angry for these poor people. I feel like I need to get involved in a campaign of sorts, same with the Daniel Morgan enquiry report that Priti Patel is trying to buryI know its a bit of a thread ressurection but there is an updated program this week
BBC Radio 4 - The Great Post Office Trial, 11. The Reckoning
Nick Wallis provides an update on the Post Office scandal, with startling new details.www.bbc.co.uk
just as eye opening as ever
Someone needs to.
