To draw your attention to Mr Bates vs The Post Office

Sadly I think you’re right.

Yes , he wouldn’t said he won’t accept an honour until Paula Vennells loses hers.

A man with integrity and honour. Unlike Vennells. She’ll never give her honour up , she’ll go kicking and screaming.

It's gone into a lost money account then profits.
The post office had special powers so police were not involved. Then when interviewing suspects they lied to them and used coercion to get them to plead guilty to lesser charges pointing out their contract said they were liable for all losses.

I'm strangely unsurprised by Vennells becoming a priest. There's a certain manipulative, narcissistic, personality type for whom it's an attractive position of power.

Of course I don't know the woman, but I that's certainly the vibe I get from her.

For some reason she reminds me a lot of Rebekah Brooks née Wade.

(Many men of the same stamp also available, of course.)

Paula Vennells was a Priest quite worryingly . Blimey, I’m sure she’d burst into flames if she ever had the gall to walk into a church!
Shes a disgrace.

Paula Vennells also oversaw the mediation process - that should have resulted in the SPMs being compensated without having to embark on a very costly court case, but instead resulted in the PO sitting there and blaming the SPMs for that happened to them and basically wasting even more of their money, time, energy and already shaky morale. She is an utter disgrace, and her sex has nothing to do with it.

Adam Crozier was CEO of Royal Mail until 2010. At the time, Royal Mail owned Post Office. David Mills was CEO of Post Office 2002-2005 and was succeeded by Alan Cook. He left in 2010. There was then a gap before Paula Vennells was appointed, by which time Post Office was no longer owned by Royal Mail.

Horizon started being rolled out to branches in 1999. Vennells is the CEO most closely identified with the Horizon issues because Bates didn't really start campaigning until 2009 and the campaign didn't gain much traction until 2012, by which time Vennells was in place. Her predecessors and the various chairs of the board over the relevant time period all share responsibility for what happened. But Vennells, in my view, carries the greatest share. She had all the evidence that there were problems with Horizon, but turned a blind eye. She misled parliament and broke promises to MPs and subpostmasters. It seems clear from what we know that protecting Post Office's reputation was more important to her than doing the right thing for those who had been wrongfully convicted and/or had their lives ruined by Post Office.

But Paula Vennels was CEO after ?2012 - the problem started in 1999 - where are all the other men who ran the post office over that time - surely someone has the names.

So the people that allowed these poor post masters to be prosecuted should be charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice in my opinion.
Wouldn’t it be great to see people actually jailed for this ?..

This is from Feb 2020. Being repeated tonight on R4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000f5hb?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

There wasn’t any missing money. It was just a number wrongly generated by a computer. And the sums in question were ridiculous, because they were supposed to represent massive amounts of cash taken at the counter - amounts of money these little post offices would/could never have handled in the time frames in question. The actual money involved in this debacle was the money the sub post masters were (wrongly) made to “pay back” to PO. Where that money was held and where it ended up is the question. The programme suggests it just went back into PO profits. The PO were effectively scamming these poor people, and that’s why a criminal investigation is urgently needed against PO.

I just watched it, then the documentary on itv and bbc i player. Its shocking , what confuses me is, where is the money that went missing then? Where did it go, who had it ? I don't understand. I agree the Post Office should be prosecuted but what about Futijsu, they sold a system that was not fit for purpose?
Shame Paula Vennels cant pay back her 400k bonus to the poor people who lost it all .

Post Office can investigate and prosecute on its own. The police and CPS weren't involved. And you are right that the cash didn't exist. The subpostmasters didn't owe this money.

Believe me: YOU are not the dim one who is seeking to ignore sense and justice in order to pursue a personal agenda.

Im still watching the programme. What I don’t understand is , how was anyone prosecuted when the money wasn’t traced ? Surely the police and CPS needed proof that the post masters had indeed taken the money ?
Where was the money? What account did it go to ? Where was it transferred to ? It must have gone somewhere surely ?
Sorry for being dim, I just don’t understand how anyone could be charged without proof they had taken the cash. The cash didn’t exist as such did it ?

I think that NDAs are unenforceable if they seek to cover up criminal wrongdoing, as demonstrated by the ones Harvey Weinstein was doling out that came to light

I'd assume that, too. I wonder if there are any legal get-arounds?

Ugh. Sorry my long post is so incoherently written. Congratulations anyone who slogged through that...

I'm assuming Fujitsu have issued a raft of Non Disclosure Agreements to all manner of critical staff

Alan Bates on Newsnight BBC2, starting right now.

https://www.itv.com/watch/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-the-real-story/10a1798/10a1798a0001

This just goes over the background to the dramatisation. For more detail you need the Radio 4 podcast:

Also did someone mention that there was a real life documentary on the real Mr Bates ? Where can I find it ?

It doesn't have to start off with corporations deliberately trying to be evil - just self-interested. I know a little about letting of govt IT contracts.

The TL;DR is that any supplier who gets a contract to operate an IT system in addition to supplying it may be able to create enough disruption, at the end of the contract, to bring the entire service to a halt for months. Where "the service" is the Post Office, or the air traffic control system, or the NHS, or HMRC. So replacing an incumbent supplier, because their contract has expired or they have fallen below a Service Level Agreement, can be nigh impossible.

Longer version.
Fujitsu will have produced a system to a deadline, and realised the system didn't work very well, but once the PO had abandoned paper accounting, there wasn't an alternative system the PO could just click its fingers and migrate to.

There would be the visible expense of removing the old, and supplying and installing the new, of tens of thousands of pieces of hardware spread round every sub Post Office in the UK.

But that's peanuts compared with the other damage a supplier can cause.

Suppose a contract expires and the incumbent supplier doesn't win the contract for the next 10 years' supply: the contract is awarded to a competitor.

The original supplier may not be in a mood to co-operate with the new supplier, or with the government. For the many months remaining of the contract, the original supplier may do the absolute minimum required to avoid being successfully sued (which will depend on the exact wording of the contract and how much money the supplier is prepared to throw at lawyers). The supplier might de fact do no work at all for 6 months.

Then there's the on-going user data. Contractually there may be an obligation for the original supplier to hand this over to the new supplier. But why stir their stumps to do this in a timely manner.

And when they do finally supply the data, it might not be in a form readily useable by the new supplier, who has spent months or years building or adapting their own proprietary software. The new software is unlikely to mesh with the original supplier's proprietary software, to which the new supplier will probably not have had access.

And on top of all that, the original supplier may claim it is not able to output any but the most basic user data (certainly not enough to do the year's accounting or keep 7 years of records), because of some way this is embedded in the original supplier's proprietary software which the original supplier does not have to relinquish.

You would think the contract would have covered all these bases, but it might not. Or the supplier might have big lawyers and is hoping either to win outright or scare off the government dept (which just wants to get on with its day job), or at least delay enough to cause enormous loss and nuisance and discourage anyone from dumping or crossing it ever again. Tactic sound familiar?

In addition to all of this, suppliers which fail to get contracts have taken to actually suing the government for the process. Eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/24/virgin-trains-takes-government-to-court-over-west-coast-route

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this particular 2019 case, I'm aware that the arrival some years ago of suing, as a tactic by losing bidders, put the fear of god into procurement departments. It added yet another criteria to the job of choosing which supplier for a mega contract, viz, which supplier was most likely to attempt to sue (successfully or otherwise - the process is the punishment. Again, sounds familiar).

Fujitsu (or ICL as that part of it was when it started) have to take a lot of the blame here.

This is what one former employee had to say -

This is what interests me too. Corporations are made up of people and I doubt they were evil and consciously trying to frame the sun postmasters.

I'd love to know the story from the post office perspective, my guess is it's a case of group think where they quickly concluded the horizon system was bringing to light long standing fraud and fiddling. Once that idea had taken hold it was so established no one stopped to question it.

Baffling that of all the auditors no one stopped and thought, 'this woman really doesn't seem like a thief, what's going on here?'
No one paused and thought 'all these people protesting their innocence, what if they are telling the truth?'

Once it got political I'm sure arse covering came into it and they were just determined to shut it down to protect themselves and that's when the toxic behaviour kicked in but I'd love to understand what got them to that situation with no questioning of the story they were telling of large scale fiddling by small business owners.