Some people at the top should go to jail for this.

They have ruined lives & caused premature deaths. I bet they won't. Let's remember the Post Office is a company, not part of Royal Mail, or the state. This is just corporate malpractice at the highest level.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68663750

Cover up, no doubt. Top brass should get 5 years, at least. Mass muderers, they really deserve life & being made bankrupt TBH.

 

Those responsible should go to jail.. from Vennells down.

 

Despicable people. I don't know how they sleep at night.

 

The Government seem to think that shoving a few bob in the direction of those wrongly convicted and passing a law saying that they are all innocent is justice done. It's not because this whole saga was about abuse of power, position and resources by those at the very top of the Post Office. Justice will only be served if they are bought to account.

 

People at the top never go to jail in this country.

 

Just occasionally they do.. Jeffrey Archer, Chris Huhne and Jonathan Aitken in recent years.

 

Itv news has just shown an exclusive... a leaked tape of a zoom meeting from 2013 where Paula Vennells is specifically told that Postmaster's tills can be altered without their knowledge.
One bent b*****d on the call points out that if a whistle blower leaked the information it would be very damaging to the Post Office case. It proves beyond any reasonable doubt that she and the Post Office lied to MP’s and the Court.

 

What I still haven’t understood is that it’s become clear that people at Fujitsu were tampering with the Postmasters’ accounts, but why? What were they gaining from doing this?

 

Yes, that's what confused me too.

 

I suspect that they knew the system wasn't working properly and tried to massage the figures on the fly. After they'd done it and realised they'd made it worse, they must have been afraid to tell their bosses for fear of the sack so they covered it up. The only way they could cover it up was to keep meddling...

 

The thing behind all this is that traditionally post offices were paid a 'retainer'... basically a wage for the postmaster.. his responsibility was to keep the paper books in order manually. Post Office wanted to get rid of the retainer to save a couple of hundred quid a week( more on large branches) on each post office and have a simple computerised system that anyone could operate, they could then shut the Post Office and offer the business to an existing corner shop to operate as an add-on without paying the retainer.
In the late 90’s they ran a live working trial of the system in the North East and found it was a disaster, but made no prosecutions... instead of going back to square one they implemented a full roll out with the same system but 'upgraded'... because they had withdrawn the dedicated paper book keeping facility, Post Offices could not check their own figures and had to rely solely on Horizon. One woman in Scotland was alleged to have sold £16k of stamps and not accounted for the cash, but the only way to verify it was by Horizon and the computer said she was guilty. They knew about the faults but instead of coming clean, put Fujitsu to work through the night altering obvious mistakes without the postmaster ever knowing. The scale of the problem was so huge that Fujitsu couldn't put everything right and the PO decided to start forcing postmasters to pay the 'missing' money back or prosecuting them rather than let the world know that the system was a basket case.
I first realised that PO Ltd were bent about 10 years ago, they announced a 'consultation' to facilitate the closure of our favourite branch.. with the connivance of staff there we formed an action group to fight the consultation. We got a petition together with several hundred names on it but were tipped off that PO counted a petition as only one objection... we then organised an individual letter of objection campaign.. a hell of a job, but we got 192 letters and put them in under signed for delivery. When the consultation result was released it showed 22 in favour of closure and 9 against(including the petition)... We contacted PO and asked about the letters, they denied having them.. I told them we would be reporting the theft to South Yorkshire Police and putting it in the newspapers. Within an hour they were on the phone saying they'd found the letters.
We still however put the story in the papers and I as spokesperson said a couple of controversial things ( apparently.).
After the news broke I had the branch owner on the phone.. rather irate tbh. (I can't remember now exactly what had upset him)
After a couple of hours we had resolved the issue and got on like a house on fire... he told me then that his problem was not the withdrawal of the retainer as we had thought, but the fact that the branch had suddenly started sustaining large unexplainable losses and that basically he was having to use his life savings to make good the losses. The Post Office shut and moved into a badly sited corner shop.. I hope the owner is one of those fighting to get his life savings back.