Anyone watch Mr Bates vs The Post Office ?

[grober]

You just couldn't make this up.
No 10 ‘taking seriously’ reports that Horizon files show Post Office cover-up
"Her comments followed claims by the BBC that a meeting of a Post Office board subcommittee, codenamed Project Sparrow, was held in April 2014. The meeting reportedly came nine months after the forensic accountants Second Sight had submitted a report identifying bugs that raised concerns about the reliability of the Horizon data used to prosecute post office operators, in what has since been described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”.

The broadcaster said minutes showed the subcommittee asked for a paper to be prepared on the accountants, as well as for “options to support them or reduce their role”.


Three weeks after the first meeting, the subcommittee decided to bring the investigation of branch operators’ cases “within the control of the Post Office” and removed Second Sight from its role of investigating the cases independently aledgedly

The Project Sparrow sub-committee was led by Post Office chair Alice Perkins and included chief executive Paula Vennells, alongside the Post Office's most senior internal lawyer, general counsel Chris Aujard, and Richard Callard, a senior civil servant at UK Government Investments, then a division of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Post Office accused of cover-up over secret Horizon documents

BBC obtains unredacted minutes showing government knew of plan to sack experts who found Horizon IT bugs.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[ss201]

How many more times can we be shocked by the revelations in this horror story? The terribly sad part of this story is that the ones who were responsible for all the misery and suffering meted out to hundreds of innocent subposties will inevitably get away with it. Shame on them.

 

[grober]

TODAY - LIVE ON BBC NEWS CHANNEL!
Ex-Post Office boss Paula Vennells will give evidence to the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal over the next three days
Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019, which included the last few years of the scandal
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted because of the faulty system

 

[del320]

Watching this now. Excruciating.

Present question - "How could you NOT have known..."

 

[del320]

She is now in tears...

 

[m80]

I know the term is usually applied to false and inappropriate accusations,
but it seems right to call this a witch hunt?

Happy hunting.

 

[grober]

Obfuscation seems to be her operative tactic! Its not working!

 

[del320]

Jason Beer KC has comprehensively dismantled Vennels' competence and character.

Never thought a Public Inquiry could be so riveting! I wish I had the time to watch the remaining two and a half days.

 

[del320]

...weeping again...

 

[grober]

crocodile tears

 

[StMarks]

crocodile tears

One tear for each £10k of bonus & dividends she took for performing her token role.?

 

[Bellow]

Why were the sub postmasters' accounts altered by Fujitsu?

 

[m80]

Why were the sub postmasters' accounts altered by Fujitsu?

Could well be wrong, but It struck me these was a "this is fun" hi jinx type of juvenile actions.
So when will there be investigations into who had that authority,
who carried out the actions,
and what management awareness was there?

Certainly as it became known that subbies weren't guilty, and Horizon was the cause, it must have been known that Fulitsu employees were the issue.

 

[Bellow]

Could well be wrong, but It struck me these was a "this is fun" hi jinx type of juvenile actions.

For 'fun' you reckon. Not convinced but there isn't a more credible reason that's obvious either.
I get that the PO when it first became aware of the discrepancies believed the sub postmasters' had their hands in the till. But without the Fujitsu alterations there'd have been nothing to suggest that they did. If you are correct then those responsible deserve lengthy custodial sentences several multiples of those that the jailed sub postmasters received.

 

[JHS]

I may be wrong but she does not strike me as a hard nosed corporate executive. Rather as a person over promoted (Buggins turn) surrounded by incompetent and venal managers and an IT supplier that lied to everyone about a crap system.
Of course she has to take responsibility as CEO but the individuals responsible in Fujitsu and the PO prosecution office are directly responsible and should be punished.
Moya also seems keen to distance herself.

 

[Ted]

Why were the sub postmasters' accounts altered by Fujitsu?

There could be a number of reasons.
Due to bad coding, there could have been reconciliation errors which were fixed manually, comms errors between the Horizon terminal and the main servers could have introduced errors, and errors within the system could have caused faulty writes to the database.
All of this should have been picked up in various accounting logs, and Fujitsu should have been totally open with their customer(s) about it.
Long time ago (around 1987 I think) I had to go to a place in Italy (L’Aquila) where a system was giving checksum errors (at operating system level) for the data in the database - we called it a group format error or GFE (known internally as ‘gone for ever’)
The operator was ‘fixing’ the error by truncating the record which recalculated the checksum. God only knows what data was missing. The establishment looked like a college but had armed security guards outside.
Issue turned out to be a bug in the firmware on the disk controller.

 

[m80]

I've read of subbies that saw end of day balances change before their eyes.
I read of some that see a negative at end of play, be double that come the morning.

Much of the Fujitsu 'amendments' seem to be over night. Why would that be?

To me it looks to be other, or more, than software, or comms issues.

 

[Ted]

Not if the errors were being flagged up and then being reconciled manually.

I’ll also add that in the forty years I was in IT, I can’t recall a single multi-user system that didn’t have a way to access someones account remotely.

 

[JHS]

Not if the errors were being flagged up and then being reconciled manually.

I’ll also add that in the forty years I was in IT, I can’t recall a single multi-user system that didn’t have a way to access someones account remotely.

The Fujitsu remote access was seemingly less to do with reconciliation and more to do with tinkering.

 

[m80]

The Fujitsu remote access was seemingly less to do with reconciliation and more to do with tinkering.

Different subject really,
but a fair warning of how our growing dependence on IT,
and the naive trust in it,
could f' us all over.

There, but for the grace of not being a P.O. subby, go any of us.