Mr Bates vs The Post Office

[Jacko51]

If you watched this ITV Drama about the scandal of the treatment of the sub post masters, you may wish to sign this petition.

Petition · Strip CBE from Paula Vennells due to miscarriage of justice under her leadership · Change.org

CHNG.IT

 

[robf]

@Jacko51 it's a brilliant and heart rending drama. The callousness of the post office / Fujitsu is something else. I will be signing the petition for sure!

[tommytunstall]

This was television drama at its best, wonderful acting. Vennells and her cronies at the PO can hang their heads in shame, so can Fujitsu and the Government. Knowing innocent people were going to jail, losing their homes, and some even took their own lives shameful.

[Warren]

As an ex internal auditor (and external auditor) I'm staggered by these events. Of course they should be auditing the key system and it's management. Of course they should have found the weaknesses in financial control and the associated management incompetence. Of course the internal audit team normally has access to the board by way of its audit committee for reporting purposes. So where were they?

I don't know. But an insidious corporate culture can do things like ensure internal audit has insufficient resources, has difficulty getting access to key managers and systems or is not listened to when findings are made. In other words ineffectiveness and compromised independence exists where managent don't want to be criticised. Given the Post Office's financial plight, cutting internal audit can be an easy saving as well leading to no independent checking of financial and other management systems. 

We all know some big organisations who have had humongous failings deeply affecting people's lives. RBS and the financial services crisis comes to mind. This one is right up there. I was also a fraud investigator before retiring and so I want to see a balanced, fair but remorseless independent investigation of wrong doing leading to criminal prosecutions and civil actions against all perpetrators where warranted. It is essential for promoting deterrence of fraud in the corporate UK economy. 

I don't know who the external auditors were. But they've been signing the annual accounts off. I guess they will shout up that events were well below the materiality level. But if you see a big number of employees / contractors being sacked and prosecuted and if you have good intelligence systems you must know there is something significantly wrong that needs to be properly understood. I'm unimpressed!? I hope this isnt an example of compromised external audit. That happens many ways including compromised independence and driving down the cost of external audit so that the absolute minimum service is provided. Where was the external auditor is also a question to be answered. 

[Jacko51]

Vennells is handing back her CBE.  An admission of guilt or incompetence??

[Guitar Ray]

3 minutes ago, Jacko51 said:

Vennells is handing back her CBE.  An admission of guilt or incompetence??

….or both?

[Lornelounger]

Having a CBE taken off her is the very least that should be done.  It would be nice to see some of the money she took out of the system get paid back too.  The world seems full of liars, cheats and incompetents who are still able to harvest millions in salaries - how on earth did this not get spotted earlier?

[robf]

38 minutes ago, Jacko51 said:

Vennells is handing back her CBE.  An admission of guilt or incompetence??

For me, it's the first "right" thing she appears to have done. She's massively to blame for devastating the lives of hundreds of people, so I just hope she now takes stock and is honest when she appears at the inquiry again.

However, I do hope she's not being seen as the sole/main villain in all this. For example when those really oppressive investigations were taking place it was Adam Crozier who was CEO and his role seems to have been largely forgotten because it was Vennells who featured in the drama series.

Vennells clearly has an awful lot to answer for but she wasn't the CEO until 2012. The prosecutions of the postmasters began in 2002. She's in effect responsible for the continued cover-up and continuing their "Post Office's reputation first" strategy for sure, but it was other people who decided to aggressively prosecute and not check their system was broken before her who are also culpable. Not to mention the firm that made such a pigs ear of it in the first place.

[mr.hobblesworth]

3 minutes ago, robf said:

For example when those really oppressive investigations were taking place it was Adam Crozier who was CEO and his role seems to have been largely forgotten because it was Vennells who featured in the drama series.

 

>> Post-truth <<
An interesting omission

ITV has a new miniseries on the slate for 2024: Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It's a biopic of the Post Office scandal in which an IT <ovf censored>-up saw hundreds of employees wrongly accused of theft and fraud, a saga generally considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK history.

A quick look at the cast list shows they've found someone to play Paula Vennells, the CEO of Post Office Ltd at the time, but there's no-one playing Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail Ltd.

Crozier played a significant role in the real-life scandal, but looks to have been snipped out of the dramatisation. Maybe it was just too tricky to write the scene where Crozier left Royal Mail to become CEO of... ITV.

Hungarian Ventrilo-Choir – Popbitch

POPBITCH.COM

 

[robf]

1 minute ago, mr.hobblesworth said:

>> Post-truth <<
An interesting omission

ITV has a new miniseries on the slate for 2024: Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It's a biopic of the Post Office scandal in which an IT <ovf censored>-up saw hundreds of employees wrongly accused of theft and fraud, a saga generally considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK history.

A quick look at the cast list shows they've found someone to play Paula Vennells, the CEO of Post Office Ltd at the time, but there's no-one playing Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail Ltd.

Crozier played a significant role in the real-life scandal, but looks to have been snipped out of the dramatisation. Maybe it was just too tricky to write the scene where Crozier left Royal Mail to become CEO of... ITV.

Hungarian Ventrilo-Choir – Popbitch

POPBITCH.COM

 

There's an excellent podcast series on BBC Sounds which goes into the crisis. 

Some of the stuff on there is really illuminating - Fujitso managers who put out orders for no electronic minutes of meetings regarding Horizon, ordering an internal review from an unqualified staff member with the instructions to only accentuate the positives of Horizon and then calling it an "independent review" of the system etc...

This is not to underplay the role of Paula Vennells but with such a huge injustice, I think it's lots and lots of people who should be held accountable...

BBC Sounds - The Great Post Office Trial - Available Episodes

WWW.BBC.CO.UK

 

[The French Connection]

55 minutes ago, Jacko51 said:

Vennells is handing back her CBE.  An admission of guilt or incompetence??

I think she's done it because it's better for her to give it back, sounding all pious, rather than being stripped of it. 

[Loggerheads Sage]

23 minutes ago, robf said:

For me, it's the first "right" thing she appears to have done. She's massively to blame for devastating the lives of hundreds of people, so I just hope she now takes stock and is honest when she appears at the inquiry again.

However, I do hope she's not being seen as the sole/main villain in all this. For example when those really oppressive investigations were taking place it was Adam Crozier who was CEO and his role seems to have been largely forgotten because it was Vennells who featured in the drama series.

Vennells clearly has an awful lot to answer for but she wasn't the CEO until 2012. The prosecutions of the postmasters began in 2002. She's in effect responsible for the continued cover-up and continuing their "Post Office's reputation first" strategy for sure, but it was other people who decided to aggressively prosecute and not check their system was broken before her who are also culpable. Not to mention the firm that made such a pigs ear of it in the first place.

Totally agree Rob,  many many people badly at fault here.  The lies the PO told to everyone are incredible.  Ed Davey, PO minister at the time,  stated even he was lied to. The depths of this cover up are only now coming out, along with the human misery of the poor sub post masters. 

I do think though that the government passing legislation to overturn ALL the convictions is a difficult one.  CAN the government do that, legally?     Plus, I guess, there are bound to be some guilty ones out there.   Very difficult,  because to look at them individually,  I'm guessing,  will take months/ years.

Awful scandal,  how has it taken so long to get to here? And yet 1 TV program and all hell breaks loose

[robf]

Yeah, I think legislation would be a slippery slope. It gives any government a bit of a free hand to add laws that suit then when it comes to legal cases. 

I don't know enough about the legal system to know what's possible to get this fast-tracked but I would hope it takes months rather than years to resolve. 

Off on a bit of a tangent here but... I'm sad enough to listen to a whole day's worth of the hearing (available on YouTube folks). I listened to an IT expert who was asked to check out the Horizon system. His findings were just breath-taking. The system was absolutely unfit for purpose. Here's a summary of what he found:

• There was no project plan or scope
• There was no mapping out of how the various modules would interface with each other
• The project manager was basically absent from the office
• He was reporting to someone who had no IT/project management experience and had no idea how to implement a project of this size and complexity
• There was no consistency in coding conventions (i.e. in multiple projects you usually have a naming convention so someone else can pick up your work easily)
• Bug fixes were not documented (so there was every chance that an old bug fix would be removed in order to correct a new bug fix)
• Code was badly constructed with things like - hardcoded values, parts of the script that would never be invoked (i.e. the parameters to make that routine work would never happen), reams of code could have been cut down to reduce the size of the script etc...
• The number of bugs was continually increasing not decreasing
• He identified the problem as being one particular part of the system which if rewritten with the better programmers in the building could have resolved the majority of issues. This proposal was rejected and he was basically swiftly moved onto another project. 
• In essence, he was brought in to give his view and then his view was completely ignored

The poor guy wasn't to blame - he had highlighted all the failings and expressed his deep concern but as a contractor he was basically sidelined and moved on. During the hearing you can just see his bemusement that such an important project was basically handled by a bunch of poorly trained coders with no-one managing them day to day.

 

[The French Connection]

1 hour ago, Loggerheads Sage said:

Totally agree Rob,  many many people badly at fault here.  The lies the PO told to everyone are incredible.  Ed Davey, PO minister at the time,  stated even he was lied to. The depths of this cover up are only now coming out, along with the human misery of the poor sub post masters. 

I do think though that the government passing legislation to overturn ALL the convictions is a difficult one.  CAN the government do that, legally?     Plus, I guess, there are bound to be some guilty ones out there.   Very difficult,  because to look at them individually,  I'm guessing,  will take months/ years.

Awful scandal,  how has it taken so long to get to here? And yet 1 TV program and all hell breaks loose

I can't imagine many postmasters stealing thousands of pounds.  Very rare, I would think. 

And I'm not sure I would be so believing of Ed Davey and his 'I was lied to' claim.  He's a lot to lose right now, being election year and all that.  If he was lied to, however, there ought to be a paper trail: by correspondence, minutes of meetings etc. 

[Old School]

It never ceases to amaze me when people's moral compasses basically stop functioning. It is a fact that any number of post office and fujitsu management and staff were fully aware that innocent people were being put in prison, yet not one of them had the balls to whistle blow the scandal. Also, the government(s) show yet again that they are not fit to run a bath.

If there is a tiny sliver of justice remaining in this country there ought to mass resignations and lots of jail time for the worst offenders. 

I am not however holding my breath.