MR BATES VS THE POST OFFICE - mon to thur ITV 9pm - tv pace no spoilers

[Blondeshavemorefun]

Mon to thur

Mr Bates vs The Post Office is an ITV drama based on a true story of injustice starring Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh, WIll Mellor and Monica Dolan.
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a hard-hitting ITV1 drama starring Toby Jones, Monica Dolan and Julie Hesmondhalgh among others.

The series details one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, where thousands of Post Office sub postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a defective IT system.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office follows Alan Bates (Toby Jones), a sub postmaster who decided to fight back against a scandalous miscarriage of justice.

He was one of thousands of sub postmasters and postmistresses who between 2000 and 2013 were falsely accused of theft due to financial discrepancies thrown up by the flawed Horizon computerised accounting system.

More than 700 were prosecuted and several went to prison while others lost their homes and life savings trying to pay back the money the Post Office claimed was missing.

Many were unfairly ostracised from their communities, who believed they were criminals.

In 2009 Alan Bates decided to form the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (https://www.jfsa.org.uk/), uniting thousands of his colleagues to
fight to clear their names.

Investigators and auditors were bonussed on the amount they recovered from subpostmasters. That meant they were incentivised to accept Horizon's figures and blame the subpostmaster without investigating to see if there could be some other cause. Getting the subpostmaster convicted then allowed them to use the Proceeds of Crime Act to take all the subpostmaster's assets to pay off the alleged debt, hence earning their bonus.

That is absolutely disgusting.

So that’s where the money went?

I think those sorts of bonus schemes should be disclosed to those being prosecuted. Or banned.

Im aghast that there’s been very little honour and integrity in this scandal.

Meanwhile there's a link between Fujitsu and Infosys, the company owned by the Prime Minister's father in law. No conflict of interest there then.

"In just over one year Rishi Sunak has given £3.6bn to Fujitsu, in the 3 years before that they only got £1.3bn.

RT if Fujitsu need to pay the sub-postmasters compensation and Rishi Sunak and Infosys's dealings with Fujitsu need to be laid bare."

At the start of this thread I said I could t watch as I'd get to angry and it was mentioned by the OP how they agreed but thought it a necessary evil to possibly gain traction for redress

Well done on your prescience! Let's hope now things really happen and quickly and also fairly.

I do hope that calls from certain quarters to make Alan Bates a Sir aren't an attempt to cosily close the issue down before some powerful people swing, as they surely must do.
Anyone know if Fujitsu has any paid "consultants" with other perhaps more public jobs?

I can’t answer for him but I don’t think he would accept. He has already turned down an honour. Can’t recall if it was an MBE or OBE etc.

I hope there will be more whistleblowing, and if Gareth Jenkins was really ‘pressured’ then he should reveal what really happened otherwise face the consequences of being the person responsible. There must have been a toxic culture though where one couldn’t make mistakes or admit to them as it looks like the aim was just to cover mistakes up and save face which obviously resulted in a disastrous and frankly dangerous product!

I'm watching the Post Office Inquiry live(ish) broadcast. When I watched these pre-Christmas there would typically be c300 viewing live - today there's 2.1k and rising. The investigator being called upon today to give evidence was due to have done so several weeks ago but was postponed due to failures in disclosure by Post Office. It seems ironic that their session would have gone largely unnoticed had it gone ahead as originally planned.

🤷🏻‍♀️ the Post Office seems very hesitant to disclose information! Nick Wallace requested the figures below from the Post Office a number of years ago, the Post Office then a few months ago contested the numbers maybe forgetting that these numbers came from them but then I guess their software is unreliable so maybe they’re right in thinking the numbers aren’t correct!

Oops sorry his name is Nick Wallis 😂

The taxpayer also deserves to know how much of our money was spent by the Post Office on this scandal - I believe a starting figure of £100 million…

This is wildly inaccurate.

Sunak's father-in-law was one of seven co-founders of Infosys. He does not own it. He retired over a decade ago. Infosys is not owned by an individual. Sunak's father-in-law isn't even a major shareholder.

There is no link between Fujitsu and Infosys. There were claims on social media that Infosys and Fujitsu were both involved in the government's emergency alert system, but these have been debunked. Infosys was not involved, either directly or indirectly. Infosys and Fujitsu have partnered in the past, but the last formal partnership between them was around 20 years ago.

Sunak has not personally given £3.6 billion to Fujitsu, and the timescales quoted are totally wrong. This is based on a misunderstanding of an article in the Financial Times two days ago. According to that article, the true figures are that Fujitsu has been involved in £4.9 billion of solo and joint public sector contracts since the Horizon judgement in December 2019 (i.e. the last 4 years 1 month). Since at least some of this is joint contracts, they have not received the full £4.9 billion. Some of it has gone to their partners. Of this £4.9 billion, £3.6 billion happened when Sunak was Chancellor or Prime Minister. He was appointed as Chancellor in February 2020 and has held one or other office for 3 years, 7 months approximately. So, if the Financial Times is correct, the government has paid £3.6 billion to Fujitsu or its partners in 3 years 7 months when Sunak was Chancellor or PM, and paid £1.3 billion to Fujitsu or its partners in the 6 months since the judgement when Sunak was not in either post. Sunak has not massively increased spending with Fujitsu as implied by the tweet quoted in this post.

@GoldenMalicious the timing has worked out perfectly!

Jesus Christ almighty!

This gets more and more horrifying the more that we learn about it.

Even if he accepted I think he has more integrity than to let it sway him.

He's a national treasure in the true sense of the term - there are so few people with his moral compass, courage and determination about.

Net closing on Fujitsu hopefully.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/11/fujitsu-repay-post-office-scandal-horizon-it-software

Note this quote:

>>Ministers tried to prevent Fujitsu getting more official work but this proved “impossible” despite its “woeful” performance, a Tory peer revealed on Wednesday.

sounds like Fujitsu thought it had the government over a barrel.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a major rebranding exercise from them soonish.

Anyone got any ideas for a name?

Sakashitsu?

there are so few people with his moral compass, courage and determination about.

And none of them are running the country. The contrast with the grifters and crooks who run our national organisations could not be more stark.

So where’s the money that the post office gained form the those poor people that paid the shortfalls? And these poor souls who were bankrupted?

T

The Post Office added the 'recovered' funds to their profits, and the investigators were paid percentage bonuses

https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-scandal-investigators-offered-bonuses-to-prosecute-sub-postmasters-13045910

The short answer is that it ended up in random suspense accounts, ultimately to form part of Post Office's profits.

Phase 2 and 3 of the enquiry deal with the operational failings of Horizon if you want an extremely detailed version of what was happening to the missing money (fascinating read).

It helped to boost Post Office's profits and was spent by Post Office.