UK Victims in Post Office scandal demand criminal prosecutions for those in charge - Three sub-postmasters accused of stealing more than £100,000 have called for those in charge at the Post Office to be held to account.

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A group of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing more than £100,000 from the Post Office have told Sky News there must be criminal prosecutions against those in charge.

Vipin Patel, Nicki Arch and Sarah Osolinski, who ran Post Offices in Oxford, Stroud and Cheltenham respectively, have described how their lives were destroyed by the Horizon IT scandal.

Mrs Osolinski said those in charge at the Post Office must be held to account.


"There are people with questions to answer. People that lied to the High Court. People that lied to the government and that's got to be a crime. If what we did was a crime, then what they did is 100 times worse because they were the ones that punished us for trying to keep our heads above water."

Mr Patel was given an 18-week suspended sentence in 2011 after being charged with stealing £75,000 while running Horspath Post Office.

His conviction was quashed in 2020.

"I had to borrow some money off my sister - about £10,000 - I had to cash in my Royal Mail pension and then we had to sell my wife's gold to balance the books," he said.

He described the moment Post Office auditors visited his shop: "I went upstairs and said 'God, I want to die, I don't want to live anymore' - because I knew the repercussions of this were going to be catastrophic and disastrous."

Mr Patel says he is yet to receive any compensation.

Nicki Arch was wrongly accused of stealing £26,000. She was sacked and faced a three-day trial at Bristol Crown Court in 2002. She was found not guilty.

"They're corrupt to the core," she said of the Post Office.

"They've lied and behaved disgustingly from the day this all came about. You think, it's 24 years for me and I've never, ever seen any decent behaviour coming from them."


She is also calling for bosses at the centre of the inquiry to face criminal charges.

"All those who broke the law must see British law, they must be prosecuted because that's what we do in this country."

But Nicki explained that the Post Office can never fully compensate for the impact it has had on her.

"Within two weeks it was all in the local newspapers that I'd stolen from pensioners, and I got spat at in the supermarket. So I just shut myself in for 18 months and never, ever went out. And you can't behave like that and it not have a lifetime effect on you.

"It changes you forever and there is no going back. You just learn to live. Every morning I wake up and think 'great, new day' and then think 'oh God, Post Office'.

"The pain will always be there, the memories will always be there... the screaming, the shouting, we have lived through horrific times, suicidal times."

Mrs Osolinski ran a post office near Newport, South Wales. She explained how she would cover shortfalls of between £90 and £1,000 every week for two years.

She was forced to sell her home and use all her life savings.

"I'm left now as a retired person of 67 with chronic pain, depression, anxiety - all because I was trying to do my job. You just carry on," she added.

"I get flashbacks to the time and they're not pleasant and I do think about it a lot and how different it would be and what I would be doing now.

"Because being a postmaster or postmistress is like being at the centre of a huge extended family because you get to know your customers, you get to care about your customers. They get to care about you."

Mr Patel said the Post Office was always a brand built on trust.

"The biggest thing the Post Office has done is broken the trust of the people who served them - and they have stabbed us in the back."

Last week the government announced plans to overturn the convictions of more than 900 people involved in the scandal, as well as a new compensation payout of £75,000 - although it acknowledges this may not be enough for many.

The ongoing public inquiry is due to publish its findings next year.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

In case you, like me, knew nothing about this: apparently defective software kept telling these postmasters that they had accounting shortfalls they needed to make up, when they didn't. They kept putting their own money in because they were scared of prosecution, but when it kept happening, no one could keep up. No one seems to have been able to explain where all of the additional money went or who has it now.

 

[Megaton Punch]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

In case you, like me, knew nothing about this: apparently defective software kept telling these postmasters that they had accounting shortfalls they needed to make up, when they didn't. They kept putting their own money in because they were scared of prosecution, but when it kept happening, no one could keep up. No one seems to have been able to explain where all of the additional money went or who has it now.

I had that happen once. My solution, instead of putting my own money in over and over without telling anyone, was to call my boss over and double check everything. Then the fact that it wasn't my fault was officially on record and the glitch was fixed. It worked really well!

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I had that happen once. My solution, instead of putting my own money in over and over without telling anyone, was to call my boss over and double check everything. Then the fact that it wasn't my fault was officially on record and the glitch was fixed. It worked really well!

I see you've never dealt with public sector faggot managers before.

'The software is never wrong' they will chant in your face. 'So clearly it's your fault.'

 

[Megaton Punch]

I see you've never dealt with public sector faggot managers before.

Well, you've got me there. I think I'd rather be a Roman gladiator. Or a glass taste tester. Or a snowflake salesman in Alaska. Or some other mildly humorous hypothetical job.

 

[Scolopendra Dramatica]

Poor bastards... That's the 'keep calm and carry on' attitude right there; Bong sees an issue on their watch and quietly does away with it at their own expense. Pure working class that, you don't see it above ground level anymore. Same thing that built us an empire upon which the sun never set becomes a horrifying weakness when the rest of the culture no longer plays the same game.

It's easy to blame immigration, world events and poor management on the culture shift, but events like this one hint at a much more insidious evil at play in this country; our own leaders and every middle management type thick enough to tow their line and lick their arse.

Sometimes I wish we were more like the French, God forbid, they got their guillotine out, we could do one better with a good old fashioned gibbeting. Lot of cunts in Westmin would look great dangling in cages beneath London Bridge, it's a nice festive look and the public loved it.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Well, you've got me there. I think I'd rather be a Roman gladiator. Or a glass taste tester. Or a snowflake salesman in Alaska. Or some other mildly humorous hypothetical job.

Yeah. Management can be hit or miss, depending on the sector. But public sector managers could be replaced by AI and you might see an uptick in efficiency and reliability.

The best you can do is demand an audit and try to unravel why the numbers aren't adding up. What I find really disconcerting is the 'no one knows where the money went'. Wat? It's shit like this that makes me wonder if the software was defective, or if it was 'working as intended' as someone's little moneymaking scheme.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

What I find really disconcerting is the 'no one knows where the money went'. Wat?

It went into the balance, that's it.

So I have a cup of water that I pour into a swimming pool. I have witnesses, video and documentation of me doing this. Now where did my cup of water go? That exact water exists but no longer exists as an identifiable quantity of specific water in the whole pool of water.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

It went into the balance, that's it.

So I have a cup of water that I pour into a swimming pool. I have witnesses, video and documentation of me doing this. Now where did my cup of water go? That exact water exists but no longer exists as an identifiable quantity of specific water in the whole pool of water.

Yeah, but the way they're talking it's like they can't account for the money that was paid in by those postmasters. Which I find... peculiar.

Granted, government hates to give money back, but this seems particularly egregious.

 

[Megaton Punch]

Yeah, but the way they're talking it's like they can't account for the money that was paid in by those postmasters. Which I find... peculiar.

Granted, government hates to give money back, but this seems particularly egregious.

The issue there is probably that they can't prove it. The computer said they're short 50 pounds, they put 50 pounds in, computer is happy now. They never tell anyone because stuff upper lip etc, which means there is now no proof they ever did it.

Unless it can be proven exactly how much the balance would be off given the transactions of the day then maybe they could make an argument, but the thing about software issues is that they're often unpredictable to the point of sometimes being almost non-deterministic. Poorly implemented threading can make it so if you put the exact same data in the exact same places, 1 in 10,000 times you'll get a different result.

I think "we don't know where the money is lol " is just a slightly more polite way of saying "you can't prove any of it is yours".

 

[teriyakiburns]

Yeah, but the way they're talking it's like they can't account for the money that was paid in by those postmasters. Which I find... peculiar.

They can't account for it for the same reason they picked the horizon software in the first place: they are perpetual fuckups.

 

[Molag Bal]

They kept ripping up envelopes to steal their customers' mail, as seen with the kiwi coin case. This is just a case of karma sending a bigger fish to punish them. Someone with a name like 'Patel' should know all about this.

 

[Coccxys]

That's all well and good but you're going to have to point to a law they've broken and some sort of evidence rather than just going "they should be prosecuted".

The only thing in there that is being alleged by any of them in perjury which would rely on the people making the statement knowing it was false. As far as anyone was aware the software was fine so saying so to a court isn't perjury it's just being mistaken.

 

[teriyakiburns]

As far as anyone was aware the software was fine so saying so to a court isn't perjury it's just being mistaken.

Except there's a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

 

[Feathers McGraw]

This whole story is pretty fucked up. The Post Office were allowed to privately prosecute the case, so the prosecutor, investigator and victim were all the same party, and therefore had no incentive to actually audit the system that claimed they were being stolen from. Companies being allowed to bankrupt their employees and imprison them with no police/CPS oversight seems a bit dodgy to me.

It seems like an institutional fuckup so it's probably hard to make any heads roll for it, even though loads of them were obviously complicit. They won't allow the Post Office to go bankrupt over it either so it'll end up being the taypayers paying the price for it yet again.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

I thought this would crop up on the Farms eventually. There's been a recent series made called Mr Bates vs The Post Office that's getting some traction and boosting public outrage over what's been a long running scandal. The article barely touches on the extent of bullshit. Lives were destroyed over it. I know Wikipedia is justifiably seen as a suspect source but anyone even vaguely interested should give it a look for an overview.

To give a starting point I suspect most A&N users must understand, you know those kangaroo courts American universities were running in the name of Title IX? Start there but with even less anonymity for the accused.

Computer Weekly surprisingly was one of the better coverage of the suspect matters around the scandal, mostly because the system was the main issue. One of their better articles was this one and while I could publish it all I think this bit says everything.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366544394/Peer-calls-for-every-Post-Office-prosecution-to-be-reviewed

Lawyers even celebrated sending an innocent women to jail when it knew of evidence that would make her conviction difficult. In a 2010 email which was copied to several executives, former Post Office senior criminal lawyer Jarnail Singh wrote to colleagues after subpostmaster Seema Misra was convicted of theft and sent to prison while pregnant with her second child.

Singh wrote: “After a lengthy trial at Guildford Crown Court, [Seema Misra] was found guilty of theft. This case turned from a relatively straightforward general deficiency case to an unprecedented attack on the Horizon system. We were beset with unparallel [sic] request for disclosure requests by the defence. Through the hard work of everyone, counsel Warwick Tatford, investigation officer Jon Longman and through the considerable expertise of Gareth Jenkins of Fujitsu, we were able to destroy to the criminal standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) every single suggestion made by the defence...”

Conviction overturned​

Misra had her wrongful conviction overturned in April 2021, after it was proved that the Post Office’s branch software contained errors that could cause phantom shortfalls.

People talking about how Trump is Hitler would consider that overkill as a depiction of cartoonish villainy. Also the article has links to their many previous articles about this nonsense.

I am going to get around to watching the series at some point but given it's about reality I have a feeling it might be very depressing. To add insult to injury the former Post Office boss was formally honoured for her time there and it's still waiting on her offer to return that to be formally accepted so she can be stripped of it. Even more insulting an online petition for this to happen cleared a million signatures and got next to zero news coverage in contrast to others which barely break quadruple digits.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304

Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells is handing back her CBE after facing mounting pressure over the Horizon IT scandal.
More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted based on data from faulty Horizon software between 1999 and 2015.
Some people went to prison for false accounting and theft, while many were financially ruined.
More than a million people signed a petition calling for Ms Vennells to be stripped of her CBE.

Adam Crozier, the chief executive of Royal Mail at the time of the scandal between 2003 and 2010, meanwhile on Tuesday expressed his "heartfelt sympathies" to those wronged by the "tragic miscarriages of justice".
"While I did not have any involvement in the Horizon issue during my time at Royal Mail, I feel deeply sorry for those whose lives were ruined by what happened and stand ready to participate in the inquiry's continued efforts to make sure this tragic situation never happens again," he said.
Until 2012, the Post Office was part of Royal Mail before they were split into two.
Mr Crozier was replaced by Dame Moya Greene who ran Royal Mail for eight years, during which time the company was privatised and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2013.
Government ministers have promised a plan as soon as later this week to help hundreds of sub-postmasters clear their names.
One idea being explored is passing a new law that would exonerate hundreds wrongfully convicted.
In a statement, Ms Vennells, who was Post Office chief executive between 2012 and 2019, said she had "listened" to the sub-postmasters and others calling for her to return her CBE.
"I am truly sorry for the devastation caused to the sub-postmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system."
Ms Vennells has long faced questions over her role in the scandal, which has been described as one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice the UK has seen.
While the scandal has been public knowledge for some time with a public inquiry ongoing, the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which aired last week, thrust the issue back into the spotlight.
A public inquiry into the scandal has been under way since February 2021, and will resume on Thursday following a break over Christmas.
Fujitsu - the Japanese technology company that manufactured the Horizon system - has been invited to answer questions from MPs next week.
The Business and Trade Select Committee says Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake has confirmed he will attend the evidence session on 16 January.
Ms Vennells was appointed as CBE for services to the Post Office and to charity in the 2019 New Year's Honours - despite ongoing legal action against Post Office, which was launched by 555 sub-postmasters in 2017.
During her tenure, the Post Office repeatedly denied there were problems with the Horizon system.
The Post Office said the honour was given for her work on "diversity and inclusion", and her "commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first".

However, despite the offer by Ms Vennells, the only person who can strip someone of an honour is King Charles.
People can indicate they would like to renounce their honour, as Ms Vennells has now done - but doing so has no formal effect. Until the King is advised by the Honours Forfeiture Committee and acts on its advice, Ms Vennells will continue to hold her CBE.
The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents 110,000 employees of Royal Mail (which Post Office used to be part of) said Ms Vennells' decision was "a token gesture".
CWU's national officer Andy Furey also called for her to return performance-related bonuses she received during her role at Post Office.
He said: "Since she received these bonuses while overseeing the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history, it would only be right to return this money."
Many victims of the scandal are still fighting to have their convictions overturned or to secure full compensation after being forced to pay out thousands of pounds of their own money for shortfalls that were caused by Horizon accounting software.

Jo Hamilton, a former subpostmistress who was wrongly convicted in 2008 of stealing thousands of pounds from a village shop in Hampshire, said she was glad Ms Vennells had agreed to return the honour.
"It's a shame it took just a million people to cripple her conscience," she said.
Downing Street has said it is "obviously the right decision" for Ms Vennells to return her CBE.
Former sub-postmaster Michael Rudkin, whose wife Susan was wrongly accused of stealing £44,000, said he was pleased that Ms Vennells had chosen to return her CBE.
He said he had written personally to Ms Vennells after his wife's prosecution to ask for a further investigation into her case, and received no help.

Mr Rudkin, who lost his job and union position due to the Horizon scandal, said his family had also lost friends due to the allegations.
A CBE (Commander of the British Empire) is awarded to someone who has gone "above and beyond for the community or country".
After a damehood or knighthood, it is the highest level of Order of the British Empire, and is followed by the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), then the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire).
Number 10 also said it would support "further recognition" of the work of sub-postmaster Alan Bates and others to expose the Horizon scandal.

The government has been considering options to speed up justice for wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters.
On Tuesday, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk said the idea of using legislation to quash convictions of all Post Office workers caught up in the scandal was under "active consideration".
Former minister Nadhim Zahawi has called for a "simple bill" to quash all the remaining convictions based on "bad data".
However, others have disagreed, including former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who told the BBC that it would amount to "parliamentary interference in the judicial process".
Instead, he said each case "ought to be considered on its own merits", and sent to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates alleged miscarriages of justice.
The scandal has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history, but to date only 93 convictions have been overturned and, of them, just 30 people have agreed "full and final" compensation settlements, meaning many victims are still fighting to clear their names.
Some 54 cases have resulted in a conviction being upheld, people being refused permission to appeal, or the person appealing having withdrawn from the process.

Dominic Grieve can choke to death on his own shit.

 

[Windows XP Home Edition]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036

In case you, like me, knew nothing about this: apparently defective software kept telling these postmasters that they had accounting shortfalls they needed to make up, when they didn't. They kept putting their own money in because they were scared of prosecution, but when it kept happening, no one could keep up. No one seems to have been able to explain where all of the additional money went or who has it now.

A TV drama about this scandal that aired recently put this whole controversy on the spotlight. Recently there was a hearing today in parliament about the scandal.

The Horizon software used by the Post Office was produced by Fujitsu, which was half baked and filled with bugs and glitches in the OS. It's also important to mention that The Fujitsu UK and Europe branch is also in bed with the UK government. The former UK Fujitsu CEO cabinet minister Michael Keegan's wife Gillian is the head of education in the government. I've seen news outlets put much of the blame Fujitsu but the Post Office are just as culpable for being feckless and overly reliant on technology.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Stuff like this is why all government power needs to be subject to non-governmental oversight at some level or form. When the government alleges something it should need to prove above and beyond, not less and "trust us"

I had that happen once. My solution, instead of putting my own money in over and over without telling anyone, was to call my boss over and double check everything. Then the fact that it wasn't my fault was officially on record and the glitch was fixed. It worked really well!

Seriously this.. They are RETARDED to have done it that way. If worst came to worst i'd just quit. But putting my own money into a government system.. fuck that!

 

[Overly Serious]

It went into the balance, that's it.

So I have a cup of water that I pour into a swimming pool. I have witnesses, video and documentation of me doing this. Now where did my cup of water go? That exact water exists but no longer exists as an identifiable quantity of specific water in the whole pool of water.

In this instance there was not video, documentation and the witnesses said that the wrong amount of water was going into the pool and got charged with crimes for saying so.

One thing people may not be aware of on this is just how much this was buried. This ruined people's lives. One person died without ever having their name cleared. Reputations were ruined as people were accused and convicted of stealing from their own community - which is what a local post-office serves. For Burgers who may not be aware, Post Offices are centres of community operations far beyond just collecting and dispatching letters. People deposit savings via them, make applications for licences and get forms for anything and everything incl. passports and a tonne more. A traditional community post office is one of the key institutions in most villages and towns and whilst that's somewhat diminished with the onset of the Internet for decades they were vital. And this issue goes back a long way. So when the local post office manager is convicted of stealing, that is basically turning everyone in their home village or town against them. It was fucking horrible and despite a mountain of evidence the people in charge preferred to believe that their little Fujitsu system was right. Scores of convictions of people who'd been quietly working in the role for decades with nary a problem all suddenly occurring after a new IT system came in and nobody would believe these poor people. One guy collected formal evidence and proof of what was happening and repeatedly requested a meeting with the minister in charge and repeatedly got told to F off. They could get no press, no attention and there was sweet FA coverage.

The Daily Mail is largely responsible for the fact we've even heard of this as they got wind of what had happened and led a campaign to clear their names.

This was Britain's Kafka Government at it's finest!

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

One person died without ever having their name cleared.

Multiple people have died while it dragged, there's also been a number of suicides justifiably thought to have been caused by it.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/post-office-scandal-victims-now-31788774

Each of those who were wrongly accused suffered greatly, from those who went bankrupt to the pregnant mum who found herself facing prison time. Many, including the four people who died by suicide and 33 others no longer with us will never see justice.