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Comment by johndunne | Hacker News Reader

This Post Office scandal is currently ongoing in the UK. The Fujitsu developer in question confirmed what the Post Office was denying, that the Horizon software at the center of the scandal, had implemented methods for secretly editing accounts. Approx 700 postmasters (self-employed managers of Post Office branches) were held responsible when large amounts of cash appeared to have vanished from tills, resulting in prosecutions for fraud and theft. I know someone who was affected by this, who managed a now-closed Post Office branch here in Wakefield, UK and it was a life ruining ordeal for her. She was accused of stealing £1,000's in cash. I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch, but the campaign the Post Office ran to smear any accusations of wrongfulness on the part of the Horizon software is shocking.

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> currently ongoing in the UK

To be precise it is finally getting some of the attention it deserves, both from the public and from the government.

The miscarriages of justice date from 1999 until 2015, and the high court ruling (about the software being faulty) that finally stopped the flow of convictions dates from 2019, almost five years ago. Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable.

If that delay sounds absolutely bonkers to you then yes, that is what everyone else thinks as well.

> Very little happened since then, and in particular no one has been held accountable.

Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money they allocated for compensations: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67784706

They basically allocated a pot of money to pay the people they have harmed off. But these people had to actively go out and request their conviction to be overturned. Which of course many people were reluctant to do, since it means they would be upturning their life again, and going to court and finding lawyers and etc. They understandably have very little trust in the system. So Post Office just shrugged and decided they don't need to keep that much money around.

> Even crazier. The Post Office just recently lowered(!) the amount of money

It's even worse: they're still fighting hard against the appeals, heaping more misery on the people trying to turn their lives around!

Sounds like lawyers are at the driving seat

IANAL but in my experience, the lawyers would say "doublecheck everything and if we're wrong, pay them so I don't have to spend a lot of effort litigating this". No, I would bet it's a combination of PR flacks and MBA/C-levels who would rather ruin lives than take a clear L on their record.

Lawyers don't like losing cases.

This is the leadership instructing the lawyers to fight the case. They can stop it at any time but they choose to continue the misery of their victims instead of admitting fault.

Effort = income, so I don't see why certain lawyers would not be willing to do the case.

What exactly does ‘fighting hard’ mean? I got the impression that the judges weren’t very impressed with at least some of their appearances in court.

They're hiding/losing evidence such as emails and refusing to answer questions.

They hire expensive lawyers who are experts in making black look white.

I think you highlighted it right there. They’re fighting even the slam dunk appeals, which is fucking disgusting, in my opinion.

They offer token settlements, require the victim to provide lots of evidence they wouldn't have, and expect them to pay for their own lawyers to invoke legal arcana that would get them a just compensation.

https://www.taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/01/11/hss_scandal/

And all the while Horizon is still in use and still making money vanish - via both bugs and the £95 million paid to Fujitsu to keep it going for another two years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67940125

Seems one of the former senior executives of Fujitsu now runs a gov't agency that handles contracts to digital services vendors like...Fujitsu.

Not sure how the legal authorities work in the UK but people have to be held accountable, regardless of political party. One would think the government's legal authorities have to act on behalf of the citizens not just in holding persons criminally responsible but also compensating victims.

https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/tory-donor-fujitsu-p...

The little that happened can be summarized as: the Post Office CEO from 2015 to 2019 got a CBE when she stepped down.

For those not from the UK like myself that had to figure out what CBE is - it stands for a title called Commander of the Order of British Empire. It’s granted to honor notable service in various areas, including public works like the Post Office. This acronym is apparently common enough to people from the UK that news stories within the UK call it CBE without explaining what the acronym means, so your average UK citizen must know exactly what it means.

Most people from the USA are probably familiar with the term “knighthood” or “being knighted” from the UK which is referring to the same award process but higher ranking. The two titles above CBE apparently are what knighthood refers to, known as KBE/DBE (Knight/Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire) and GBE (Knight/Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, the highest honor). So CBE is essentially the third highest honor that can be granted in this fashion.

Related to the story, it seems like the CEO in question was forced to give up the CBE title two days ago in relation to this scandal

She said she will give it back. Which doesn't mean anything, King Charles would have to agree to it.

She didn't say she would give back the associated money she got.

Just to clarify, I doubt many people from the UK would know off hand what CBE stands for even though they know what a CBE is. The full name is pretty archaic in any case so it's basically just trivia at this point.

Really? I was under the impression this was common knowledge. Certainly within my family.

There are a bunch of different orders you can get knighted in, the British Empire is just one of them, for example the fictional James Bond has a CMG, (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George), and the actor Daniel Craig who played him also has a CMG, although unlike Bond he has not turned down a KCMG (Bond turns down the knighthood because it makes you more of a public figure which is undesirable for an active secret agent whereas it's no problem for an actor).

The Order of St Michael & St George is also famous because it's how the "Yes, Minister" joke works: CMG stands for "Call Me God". And KCMG for "Kindly Call Me God" / What does GCMG stand for? / "God Calls Me God".

She was not yet "forced" to give it up, although that is likely the end result. These honours are notionally bestowed by the Monarch (so these days, Charlie) under advice, so a committee will decide that yup, Paula clearly shouldn't have this honour, take it away, and Charlie will sign the appropriate paperwork. What she's done so far is write asking that it be taken away, which is almost nothing.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. Based on your comment I looked it up and found 6 other orders, including Order of Saint Michael and George that you mentioned. OBE is apparently not the most prestigious one, the highest and most prestigious one is apparently called The Most Noble Order of the Garter. Interesting slice of old royal UK culture.

Yes. The Garter and the Thistle (and the Order of Merit) are exclusively small and also in the personal gift of the sovereign. The Order of the British Empire is much larger and appointments are made on advice from the government.

Her name is Paula Vennells.

I take this opportunity to reinforce the association of her name with the scandal in future web searches.

So, Paula Vennells's Post Office scandal?

Yep, the same Paula Vennells that got a CBE in 2019 for services to the Post Office.

https://www.gov.uk/government/people/paula-vennells

Empire strikes back.

  "Ordener hænger man paa Idioter,
  Stjærner og Baand man kun Adelen gier,
  men om de Mallinger, Suhmer og Rother,
  man ej et Ord i Aviserne ser.
  Dog, har man Hjærne,
  kan man jo gjærne
  undvære Orden og Stjærne."

(A verse from a satirical song from 1790 -- "orders are hung on idiots".)

She was CEO from 2012 and started at the Post Office in 2007 as group network director. She may not have started the miscarriage of justice, but she certainly doubled down on it.

She was also, until very recently, an Anglican minister.

Once that happens what is the process to overturn the old convictions?

> I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch...

From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...:

> One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.

The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.

> would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record

Consider the shittiest homegrown shopping portal probably doesn't do that and any commercial point of sale system absolutely won't do that either. The system has to be such a POS internally that no other vendor will take the liability for it.

Reminds me of the Therac-25 that killed people. This thing probably killed more people than that.

This was custom software on custom hardware. Bit different from some web app with built in debounce.

So is basically any point of sale system. Realllllly not an excuse.

The underlying paradigms are the same and it is inexcusable

Any word on consequences for the software engineers involved?

Compounded with the fact that the issue was happening all over the country. With a crazy number of different people - and still the issue was not investigated as a possible bug. Oh right, then lied about the whole thing.

Welp, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money and that's about it.

Jail. The people who knowingly lied and sent people to prison need to be jailed. Not fined, not given a handie, not allowed to simply retire. J.A.I.L.

They callously wrecked people's lives, including some that committed suicide.

Jail is not enough of a deterrent for the kind of enormous damage some of the involved have caused to society. For such large-scale, fully intentional, proven harm to society out of nothing but self-interest over a long period of time, stronger penalties than jail must be applied.

Such as? (Bearing in mind the ECHR)

Beating them with pool cues about the head and shoulders until their retinas detach would be a great consequence.

Would you sign up as an executor? Or would you rather have some other sadist to do it?

You have no idea how fast I would jump to be the one with the pool cue. They would have to reconsider light being the fastest thing in the universe.

It's not about sadism. It's about people getting deserved consequences for actions that greatly harmed a large number of people.

Me? I'm just tired of watching it all.

Treat people reasonably, and not be a Snidely Whiplash level of asshat or you get the pool cue.

Echr?

European Court of Human Rights.

European Convention on Human Rights https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG

Perhaps forced bankruptcy to personally pay back compensation to the Post Office. Follow the money the way they do with terrorists.

I loosely followed the discussion here on HN, but I don't see any mention of anyone from the Post Office being arrested/prosecuted/sentenced for this.

It seems that some people there abused their power and need to cool down behind bars.

In fact, they had recently shortlisted the lady in charge of the PO at the time to be the Bishop of London, because of course they had.

That's Paula Vennells and she was awarded a CBE for her role in running the Post Office. However, there's just been a petition that garnered over 1.2 million signatures for her to be stripped of her CBE and in response, she has "promised" to return it.

I, for one, don't believe her.

Apparently she can't "return" it, it has to be annulled by the British monarch.

I hope Charlie does that then, but it depends on whether he cares enough about it.

I think it would be fitting if a significant percentage of other people with CBEs started to return them with public statements about them not wanting to be associated with the likes of Paula Vennells.

It's not really on Charlie, any more than he's the one making the lists. His mother wasn't like "OH, we should honor that Post Office lady, I like receiving letters and I bet she's somehow responsible for that". She just got a list with Paula's name on it, along with various crooks, financiers, consultants, political hacks and maybe the odd charity worker.

Issuing Honours is something a Monarch does, but like declaring War or deciding what Laws should govern the country, they don't actually make decisions, that's a government problem.

So long as the general public were barely aware of a problem, this could skate along as not important for years, but now lots of people are angry because they saw a TV show and for once when they said "Hey this is terrible!" instead of "It's just a TV show it's not real you idiots" those of us who were paying attention are like "Yes, so what are you going to do about it?" which as we've seen puts pressure on government to actually do something.

It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.

> the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility.

It really depends on what Fujitsu told which PO manager.

The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67921974

This a pattern we've seen before

1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate"

2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet"

3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along".

People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality.

For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!

> The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.

A UK tradition!

> In 2009, the government came under fire when ACMD [Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs] chair David Nutt of Imperial College London was sacked for questioning government drug policy in public

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/little-has-changed-in-uk...

As I understand it, there's an ongoing PPE thing as well.

Let me guess, they (also) only sacked people that went in one direction with respect to gov policy and not the other direction?

That implies that the Post Office didn't know about the true situation, but they most definitely did know about the issues, but continued to lie and fraudulently collect money from the sub postmasters affected whilst collecting bonuses for each successful prosecution.

To sort of answer my own question: - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/13/business/uk-post-office-f... - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-quash-wrong...

From the CNN article it seems like the police is going to get involved in this, so at least some good news for the people wrongfully prosecuted by the people charge of the Post Office.

I wonder if anyone thought that it seemed a bit far fetched for 100 postmasters to all steal money. Then when it was 200, it must seem doubly far fetched. Once 500 postmasters were caught "stealing" money, wouldn't someone wonder how they managed to hire 500 dishonest people. Typically when you catch one person you always wonder how many got away with it, so they catch 500 then there must be 5000 or 50 000 postmasters that were stealing without getting caught. How many post offices are there really in the UK?

>implemented methods for secretly editing accounts.

>not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records

It seems to me that determining whether this was a bug or a deliberate backdoor that allowed someone connected to Fujitsu to change account values should have been one of the first priorities of the investigation. The CNN article I read before the BBC article didn't even mention this, it seemed to just imply that this was all a mistake or at worst the government/Fujitsu trying to coverup the fact that the software was shoddy.

Was it the post office itself that was dealing out charges? Like a post office inspector or whatever it's called? Or was it a normal police referral type thing?

So apparently in UK law, the post office carry out their own investigations before taking charges to court (effectively replacing the police for internal post office charges) which sounds mental to me.

David Davis mentioned this on News Agents. It seems like a holdover from when it was simply an arm of the state, where it made sense that it could just handle its own enforcement (since it carried the power of the Crown). It's absolutely something that needs to be stripped away in the modern day.

It's not really a holdover because the UK allows ANYONE to bring a private prosecution. They just have the resources to do it at scale.

There are legal arguments recounted in modern law textbooks that the whole idea of private prosecutions in England and Wales is a hold-over nowadays. The argument goes that since CPS decisions are subject to judicial review, the raison d'être for private prosecutions, that they allow for bad exercise of public prosecutorial discretion to be corrected by private persons, no longer exists, since the bad exercise of discretion now has another remedy.

There is a fair groundswell of opinion, already driven by the bad reputation that the RSPCA, another prolific private prosecutor, has garnered, against private prosecutions. The Horizon thing only serves to fuel this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were not soon a proposal to do away with all private prosecutions on the back of these, despite the fact that Post Office Ltd and the RSPCA are institutional private prosecutors, and there's nowhere near as strong a case that personal private prosecutors are a problem.

Stephen Lawrence parents took the option of a private prosecution. Everyone must have access to justice.

It’s the same in the US. The US Postal Inspector is federal law enforcement within the post office.

I imagine that in the US, the actual prosecution is handled by US Attorneys though (the DOJ), and not the Post Office

Not the same at all. The Postal Inspectors are law enforcement, not attorneys. They don't do prosecutions at all, the court stuff is handled by the regular Federal Attorney's who work for the Attorney General. The Postal Inspectors are basically a specialized FBI, but like the FBI, once the cuffs are on the suspect it's out of their hands. Though they may be called to testify, prosecution decisions are made by a different group responsible to different people- literally the first point of overlap in the chain of command between a Federal Attorney and a Postal Inspector is the President of the United States (the FBI, as also part of the Department of Justice, overlaps at the Attorney General).

It's not quite that, anybody in the UK can bring a private prosecution in the UK if the want, so the Post Office was not a special case here. It's really uncommon today, due to the cost, etc. and what often happens is that the "Crown Prosecution Service' which is the government organisation repsonsible for prosecuting crimes normally can 'take on' a prosecution and then choose discontinue it, which effectively stops it. Note that this is only the case in England/Wales, in Scotland the system is quite different. With that said, there are several organisations that do it still - the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) still regularly brings private prosectuions.

Historically, all prosecutions were private, and later, the police who investigated them carried them out.

    Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 3500 staff employed
    by the state-owned Post Office service were accused of
    fraud, theft or malicious accounting.

    Almost 700 of them were convicted in courts and some 230
    were jailed.

    Most were legally compelled to repay the amounts they
    were accused of fleecing, resulting in bankruptcies,
    marriage failures, substance abuse and even suicides.

    There was just one not-so-little problem – virtually all
    of those people were innocent

Thats a lot of accusations and prosecutions don't you think, for it to go unnoticed or uninvestigated for such a long duration, dont you think?

Doesnt the UK have independent non-political bodies that watch the watchers? What about protections for whistleblowers who call these things out?

Frankly that sounds Banana-Republic-ish and not something you would find in a first-rate advanced economy.

[1] Inside the incredible and devastating postal service scandal that could bring down the UK government

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/inside-the-incr...

It's been called out for a long time. I remember reading about this scandal at least 5 years ago, and it was old news then. It's only blown up now because of a TV show based on it, and the government finally getting off their ass to have a public inquiry about it. That's what's so frustrating about it: it should have been bloody obvious way sooner that there was an issue, it should have stopped when someone actually voiced the issue, and then it should have been put right as soon as it was obvious it was false. Instead it has taken years and years and years of fighting before anything resembling putting it right has occured.

There has already been a public inquiry, note. It started in 2020. It was set up by Boris Johnson. Yes, I know.

Anyone can bring a private prosecution (in England and Wales, at least. Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems).

The Crown Prosecution Service can take over any prosecution at the discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, but they didn't seem to know (and/or care) what the Post Office were doing.

It's likely they won't step in if the organisation in question has the resources to handle prosecutions at the required scale. The CPS did prosecute some cases but it's hard to blame them since they were being lied to by the Post Office investigators.

> which sounds mental to me

Isn't this very similar to how the United States Postal Inspection Service works? (although I think they don't prosecute themselves, but refer matters to the prosecution.)

I heard they are quite formidable and not to be trifled with.

Wait until you hear that the overwhelming majority of civil and criminal cases are ajudged by amateurs (magistrates) without any formal law qualification, who just happen to be local "grandees" or pensioners...

The UK justice system is not fit for purpose - unless the purpose is to let the upper classes get away with (almost literal) murder.

Lots of people have told you that anyone can bring a private prosecution. But they aren't telling the whole story. Post Office Ltd, by being a successor to the government monopoly of four centuries, is in a rather strange legal position.

The royal mail had all sorts of powers, historically, as it was a royally sanctioned monopoly, with a charter. The process of privatization left some odd conventions around, such as that it was normal for Post Office Ltd to prosecute things privately, when this has been exceptional for most other entities.

The Post Office used to prosecute for television licence offences, for example, and that only went away relatively recently compared to some of its historic powers. Historically, it had a monopoly over telephones and telegraphy, and some of the powers that the Post Office had in the 19th century were things like compulsory purchase of anyone running private telephone or telegraph systems or prosecuting people for traffic offences on the highway just because there was a mail coach involved.

The Post Office Act 1953 granted the Postmaster General some very sweeping powers, and set the bar quite low for proving fraud against the Post Office: basically, the Postmaster General's say-so for some elements. The Postmaster General also had to give consent to all prosecutions of offences against the Post Office, effectively putting prosecutorial discretion in the hands of the Post Office. And the Postmaster General also had the power to collect the fines upon conviction.

And that's part of how we ended up with the situation at the start of the 21st century.

>prosecute for television licence offences

The idea that you need a license to own a television and receive broadcasts in the UK and that the government actively prosecutes people who watch TV without a license always boggled my mind. Surely there is a more economically efficient and less absurd way to fund the BBC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

How is this different from the US Postal Inspection Service?

PIS are investigators, police. They are not prosecutors, they bring the information they collect to a US Attorney- who works for the Attorney General in the Department of Justice, not the Post Office- who actually conducts the court cases.

In Law and Order: Postal Inspectors Jerry Orbach is a Postal Inspector, Sam Waterston is the Federal Attorney, and the closest boss who intersects in their respective lines of authority is literally the President of the United States.

Although everybody keeps going on about private prosections somehow being culpable for the scandal, it doesn't seem likely.

Consider that in Scotland, private prosecutions are much rarer and are only permitted in certain circumstances. The post office could not and did not do private prosecutions in Scotland. So, as a result, do we observe lower rates of prosecutions in Scotland than in the wider UK? Nope!

In fact, in Scotland there were 100 convictions, vs 700 in the UK as a whole. The conviction rate per capita, and hence injustice rate, was actually higher in the part of the UK doing public prosecutions, than in the part of the UK doing private prosecutions. Not exactly a vote of confidence.

Yes. The Post Office historically was wholly owned by the UK Government, so maintained its own private prosecutors instead of relying on the Crown Prosecution Service. This is why it was able to fight so hard to get convictions, they had the funds to pay their own expensive lawyers to do it.

This meant those that fought the charges and lost were then forced to "pay back" the money they "stole" and also pay the Post Office legal fees and being sent to prison. The scandal is sickening on literally every level you can imagine!

A good and sad example why trifecta and separation of powers is important in democracy.

No one should share the role of prosecutor, jury and judge.

This was a regular court process, with an independent judge and jury. It’s just the prosecution was run directly by the post office and not the public prosecutor.

It still had very bad outcomes, and clearly with the prosecution not being independent enough, but it wasn’t an entirely closed process.

It's not quite regular. Normally, the (purported) victim and the prosecutor are not the same person. That's another thing that has been highlighted by this case: the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself, rather than them being prosecuted independently by the Crown Prosecution Service.

(More on which at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076)

The CPS also "successfully" prosecuted some cases based on the same evidence. If your key complainants are fabricating evidence that looks solid to a jury, separation of powers is not going to save you from the power of the state.

As I said in a related comment: if I looked hard enough, I imagine I'd also be able to find similar miscarriages of justice in the USA, too.

The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

Whereas a generic prosecutor has a bunch of cases of reports from victims that are not related to them, and thus if a case is not sufficiently strong, they'd normally just pick another case where the evidence is strong. They also have the responsibility to independently review the evidence from victims and police. These procedural checks didn't apply in the post office cases.

The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.

> The key "complaints" of GP, as I understand them, are that being simultaneously the victim and prosecutor, the prosecutor-as-victim is more incentivized to use heavy handed tactics during the prosecution process.

I know what they wrote.

> The procedural checks I mentioned above aren't fool-proof, but they're something.

I pointed out the CPS itself also prosecuted cases based on the bad evidence provided to them, so the procedural checks also did nothing.

I think we're basically on the same page, diverging only on speculative items.

Do note that the fact that CPS prosecuted cases does not mean the CPS didn't throw out dubious cases. We only know the ones they did prosecute, but we don't know how many (if any) they did not prosecute. As I said, this is speculation.

I also speculate that if you send hundreds of fraud cases to the CPS they might be suspicious why the rate of criminal fraud among the post office workers is so high.

I agree there's no evidence that the "private" prosecutions made things worse, but it surely didn't help, and deprived the system of an opportunity (whether it would have been taken or not) to prevent the miscarriages in the first place.

Honestly, the fact the Post Office were marking their own homework almost certainly made everything worse, in my opinion. I’m just taking issue with the idea that it was the sole cause, as we similar things happen under different systems, too.

> I know what they wrote.

Clearly you do not, as I made no complaint; but merely pointed out how it wasn't quite the regular court process that tomalpha said it to be, and pointed out another thing that has been highlighted by the case. As it has been. A lot more people know this about Post Office Ltd than used to, and it is oft-discussed when the subject comes up.

Post Office Ltd is not "the state". At least nominally. It was privatized at the turn of the 21st century. As I just said, one of the things that this has highlighted for people is that a private company has a normal practice of pursuing criminal prosecutions (for fraud in this case) privately, rather than via the Crown Prosecution Service which is normal practice for almost every other private company or organization when it comes to criminal matters.

More on which, again, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969076. And more on the expected consequences of this coming to widespread public attention, and another private organization that is a prolific private prosecutor, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38969548.

You’re correct, it’s not any more. I’m saying it used to be ;-)

> the fact that Post Office Ltd has inherited the ability to prosecute crimes committed against itself

Any private citizen or business in the UK has a right to prosecute crimes. It just costs a lot of money, so you can imagine how it's used (spoiler: large companies/wealthy individuals against poor people).

You should have read the more-on-which first. (-:

The Crown Prosecution Service also has the power to take over a case that is being prosecuted privately, and if they decide to take no further action on it, then the person/company that was doing the private prosecution no longer can.

It was only the prosecutor, not the judge or jury. The issue is that the Post Office lied to the judge and jury about their evidence.

There were a (relatively) small number of prosecutions from the CPS as well, which suffered from the same problem: the Post Office investigators gave the same bad evidence, which they used to convince a jury to convict.

I don't see how separation of powers helps here. I'm sure if I looked, I'd find cases in the USA where the police and/or prosecutors told a pack of lies based on dodgy evidence to secure convictions of serious crimes, too.

Prosecuting directly meant there was no outside eyes on a lot of the cases, no questions about if it was actually in the public interest to prosecute, or external assessment of the evidence before pushing for plea deals.

It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors' - because fully independent prosecutors should be rejecting cases with dodgy evidence. The police can get a bit grumpy with CPS for being quite strict at times - but it holds them to work their next case properly.

The PO clearly managed to convince the CPS in a number of cases, but had they had to do that for all there would have been a lot less cases prosecuted in total, and I think there would have been questions about their system a lot sooner.

It might not have avoided the problem, but it would have been much needed additional oversight into what they were doing.

> It's not a foolproof system, but I think most of the cases you'd find about 'dodgy evidence' would also mention a 'overly close relationship between police and prosecutors'

So the separation of powers isn’t a magic solution to the problem then.

We know they lied. Do we know specifically if they have been shown to have committed perjury?

I don’t think they perjured themselves which isn’t the same as saying they didn’t lie. It’s easy to not perjure yourself if you’re not asked the right questions.

The lie came from the fact they weren’t looking into their own evidence and realising something was up when they were prosecuting hundreds of sub-postmasters.

There’s been so much misconduct in public office I just wish there were some open and shut cases.

In the US the police are specifically allowed to lie to suspects, whereas British cops are not. If you can prove the police lied in a recorded interview or something used in evidence in court that's going to be a big problem for prosecutors in the UK but not in the US where it's expected.

Prosecutor and victim, extremely bad combination when a powerful organization is involved.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968431

Is there a podcast that talks about this?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/downloads

I recommend The Guardian's podcast episodes covering this:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisited...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/audio/2024/jan/08/revisi...

Also some Private Eye podcast episodes:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/95

It's absolutely disgusting, and it may also allow a murder to go free (or someone incorrectly jailed for murder if you believe them).

Also, strange seeing my hometown mentioned on here!

My wife and I watched Mr Bates vs the Post Office, recently, it was one of those watches where you spend a lot of time yelling "How the fuck?! What the fuck?!" at the screen because the malice and dishonesty was so deliberate, so persistently maintained, lest the "brand" be sullied.

I've been following this story for years, I know BBC's Panorama covered it in 2015, and was really surprised there wasn't more of an outcry in the UK about such blatant unfairness, guess technical cases like this are really helped by a TV drama with quality actors making it easily accessible to the general population, as soon as ITV aired the miniseries, the petition to have Vennall's CBE stripped jumped from 7K signatures to 700K+, and she said she would return it. (not the golden handshakes and "performance" bonuses though lol)

I just can't believe that no-one has been held criminally accountable (yet) for the sheer (to quote the judges in the civil case) affront to justice that this represented - whether it was Post Office Limited (POL) misleading (well, lying to) the courts, or Fujitsu employees lying in prosecutions, or POL deliberately withholding evidence in their role as a prosecutor (wild that this power to prosecute as transferred from Royal Mail to the spun off entity), and some of the cynically legalistic games they played (like asking the judge to recuse himself for being biased against them, to further delay the outcome of the civil suit).

And the crap they pulled with the Second Sight independent analysis that they commissioned themselves...

I was just reading the Clarke Advice(s), and god-damn, I can't see how any former POL executives can claim "we honestly believed all that stuff we said in court, honest", after their own goddamn independent legal advice told them "stop these prosecutions, like now, your expert witness is full of shit" The 2nd Clarke Advice is a great read too, basically "STOP TRYING TO HIDE EVIDENCE, JESUS CHRIST".

Oh, and some of the code that turned up from Horizon in an internal Fujitsus report is egregiously bad (how do I turn x into -x or -x into x? What's -(-x)? nevermind, I got this), from what I've read, the team that wrote Fujitsus was considered low skilled and mocked by other groups within Fujitsu as basically a group of clowns merely lacking a circus.

Clarke Advice 1: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...

Clarke Advice 2: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...

Fujitsu report: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/fi...

Discussion of recusal application by Court of Appeal: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/assets/recusal_judgment.pdf

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