39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question Post Office employees were wrongly prosecuted by the company as a direct result of it covering up software bugs in its Horizon IT system, the Court of Appeal in England has said as it quashed 39 convictions this morning. Those 39 convictions were obtained by the Post Office's in-house lawyers who ignored their own barristers' …
> No senior post officer manager, director, part of their legal team or representative of Fujitsu has been hauled into court on any charge relating to their corporate dishonesty regarding this.......
Don't you worry. The senior bod at the Post Office is a marked man. His retirement CBE is going to be downgraded to an MBE and he'll never live down the shame.
Paula Vennells, who was awarded CBE in 2019 for "services to the Post Office and to charity”, moved on from Post Office CEO to the Imperial College NHS Trust in April 2019. From then on she went onto other things.
Strangely enough she is an anglican priest yet put many people through a lot of suffering.
"Strangely enough she is an anglican priest yet put many people through a lot of suffering."
That's something the church, indeed many religions, have excelled at over the centuries. Much suffering the name of God, 'cos if you're not suffering then the church isn't doing its job properly.
https://news.sky.com/story/ex-post-office-chief-quits-retailer-boardroom-roles-and-church-of-england-ministry-12287322
"Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells has quit boardroom positions at retailers Morrisons and Dunelm as well as her role as a Church of England minister after a major miscarriage of justice."
A corporation or company is not a person. It's all by design. The only time this is not the case is when someone dies. This is why they hold the post office liable and allow them to be sued. Upper management will always claim no knowledge and as they hold all the evidence it can't be challenged or proven that they were culpable.
"Upper management will always claim no knowledge and as they hold all the evidence it can't be challenged or proven that they were culpable."
Either they knew and were complicit in the conspiracies to proceed with prosecutions based on unsafe or fabricated evidence or they were negligent in their duties as officiers of the company.
It's a safe bet that those lower in the chain who are clearly involved will have kept emails that incriminate their bosses.
Unfortunately unless they backed them up privately - probably against company policy and potentially GDPR - this is unlikely to be the case,
Unless you are dealing with official correspondence with outside entities that will be specifically archived, you may well find that employee email gets deleted regularly in order to avoid hanging on to any incriminating information.
It get's called "GDPR" and "not keeping superfluous data" but in reality it's mainly a way to make sure that only the history that you want recorded gets recorded. The equivalent of the electronic shredder.
But the same upper management's knowledge and skill creates the growth and profit which justifies the huge bonuses. It is not just in any way that credit goes one way and then blame doesn't follow when things are wrong. The CEO and CTO from the time should both be in jail
The remarkable piece here is that a number of people who have left fingerprints at the crime scene continue to work in Fujitsu and yet have refused to comment . Behaving honourably is something that is supposed to run deep in the culture of Fujitsu and it is a shame the current leadership appear to have forgotten this , especially when you see the wrongful convictions, lives lost and reputations left in tatters.
The Post Office said it was contacting other former SPMs to advise them how they could appeal against their convictions, and expressed remorse for its previous behaviour.
Does this mean the PO will be supporting and paying for appeals?
Or are they hoping that former SPM's won't be able to afford the appeals...
Not just the Post Office, a very large proportion of this should come from Fujitsu. They are part of this and in many ways the root cause "the system cannot be wrong".
People at Fujitsu need hauling in and if they have left, extracted from wherever they are and brought to account. At least Venelles has had the decency to publicly resign from posts she is currently in. You have not seen anyone else do that.
The PO must compensate people? That'll be us as taxpayers then. NOT that I disagree that these poor victims of outright fraud should be compensated.
I'd start with civil proceedings against the managers at the time. It won't bring in enough to compensate the victims, but at least it should bankrupt those responsible, as they've bankrupted their victims.
It seems to me that the responsible individuals at both the Post Office and at Fujitsu, along with the PO lawyers who aided and abetted the wrongful prosecutions should all be held to account for their actions.
I would also imagine there is a case for a group litigation against the above, through the civil courts as well.
Hanging is too good for'em, a damn good flogging and a few years breaking rocks and confiscation of their property, would be a start.
The fact that their own lawyers told the PO higher ups that they were in breach of laws regarding prosecutions should be considered an aggravating factor. This is more than perjury, it is surely conspiracy to pervert the course of justice repeatedly. The deliberate withholding of evidence from both prosecution and defence teams about relevant failures in the Horizon system is unlawful in the UK.
The other thing is that clearly none of the prosecution, defence or the judges in any of these cases had heard of penetration testing, or even basic system administration capabilities such as creating and administering the user (Sub Post Master) accounts. The judges should have been advised about IT security and evaluation and been far more inquisitive. I know Prof Ross Anderson can come across as a bit strident sometimes, but he would have been very useful to the defendants in pointing out that computers are as fallible as the people who build and run them.
I am genuinely appalled at the treatment of the Post Office employees, and really concerned at the lack of basic IT knowledge of the judges and solicitors involved in the court hearings. The Justice Department really needs to step up and make sure that judges hearing cases are competent to do so. Expertise in law is not enough these days.
"The fact that their own lawyers told the PO higher ups that they were in breach of laws regarding prosecutions should be considered an aggravating factor. "
Exactly. It's one thing to do something in the misguided belief you are right. It's another to be told you are in the wrong and and to keep doing it anyway.
Yes.
If you are given advice by your lawyer that what you are doing is illegal you cannot then run the defence line "I didn't know", "I was confused", "I didn't have proper advice".
A barrister has a particular duty, as a Servant of the Court, to disclose these things. Hence why that came out.
Post Office not only had their own barrister tell them to stop they also had Second Sight tell them to stop. What is very, very unusual here is that we have the internal track on who knew what when was rotten. So we know from two high quality sources that the Post Office **knew** what they were doing was wrong.
This makes it a Clear Conspiracy to Pervert the Course of Justice as the Post Office prosecutors, managers and directors had an obligation to appraise the Court of these relevant facts.
“ If you are given advice by your lawyer that what you are doing is illegal you cannot then run the defence line "I didn't know", "I was confused", "I didn't have proper advice".”
Not defending the PO but Given that the post office secured a number of convictions it looks like they knew better, despite the current overturning, they got the results they wanted at the time they wanted.
I’d like to know why they wanted to convict people instead of fixing the software, what was so important that ruining people’s lives was preferable to resolving an obvious and common problem that still needed fixing anyway?
"what was so important that ruining people’s lives was preferable to resolving an obvious and common problem that still needed fixing anyway?"
The 7-page Private Eye document, written by Richard Brooks and Nick Wallis and published last year sheds some light on that. It's tricky to summarise here.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf
This is a copy of a round robin letter I am currently circulating. If you think any of it has merit please contact the BCS and your MP with any relevant points.
I deeply regret that I had not been aware of the full iniquity of the Post Office with regard to Horizon before today. My attention was drawn to this report by a comment in The Register.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf
In the armed forces it is sometimes not just required but necessary to place individuals in situations in which they have little chance of survival. The fact is that a public body did this knowingly and totally callously to its own staff without the excuse of "Her Majesty's Forces",
There is no justification for this nor for the entity behind this black farce, Fujitsu, to continue to exist. They knowingly lied to the courts, parliament and their own people.
They should be fined into bankruptcy. Individuals who can be shown to have committed perjury should be jailed for as long as possible. No "previously of good character" exculpation should be acceptable. As they did unto others, so should they be done by.
I will write to Kemi Badenoch my MP today; I shall copy the letter to you. I shall also write to the British Computer Society, the body which awards Chartered Status requesting an immediate withdrawal of any and every qualification that has been granted to individuals in the Post Office and Fujitsu unless they can clearly and convincingly demonstrate that they were not involved in these criminal actions. This is a reversal of the normal justice process of innocent until proven guilty but if you read the report above you will note that that is how the Post Office behaved with regard to its own sub-postmasters.
If sufficient of the employees are hurt then perhaps they will finally find the courage to state what many of them had known for far too long.
Wonder if any have ISACA or ISC2 certifications, if so they would have agreed to abide by the code of Ehtics.
Having passed the CISSP recently (please don't hate me, I have a mortgage pay for and wife and kids to support), they make a big deal of these and I'm sure and the Post Office or Fujitsu staff working on that project would have clearly breached 1,2 and 4, wonder if anyone will have their certifications removed or face over sanctions?
Code of Ethics Canons:
1. Protect society, the common good, necessary public trust and confidence, and the infrastructure.
2. Act honorably, honestly, justly, responsibly, and legally.
3. Provide diligent and competent service to principals.
4. Advance and protect the profession.
Source https://www.isc2.org/Ethics
It is pretty clear from the Court of Appeal judgement that the Post Office knew there were problems with Horizon from very early on and concealed the fact.
They were, at the time, also in the position to ask Fujitsu for data from the keylogger they installed on every Horizon system that would have been able to show whether the shortfalls were caused by the people they prosecuted or by Horizon, but Fujitsu would have charged them a fat fee to deliver that data so they almost never did it. Even where they did request the data, they didn't use it to investigate whether the crimes they were alleging had been committed, they just handed it over to the defence team who had no idea how to use it. The judgement comments on this repeatedly as a breach of the prosecutor's duty to pursue all reasonable lines of investigation.
Probably because, and I speak of a previous customer of Fujitsu, they didn't have the staff with the correct skillset, who were paid just enough to live but couldn't afford risking their job, and wouldn't be able to work as a developer in another organisation as their skillset wouldn't be justifiable given the role name they were given by Fujitsu.
There internal TechVet process, where to progress to a high TS level and more money, you would be interviewed by people you work with, this basically meant, if you have friends in the office you got the opportunity to progress.
But your skillset won't be improved as you won't get training, hence senior people in roles they wouldn't be in if it were a different company.
Heck, I found Capita's staff more technical then Fujitsu's!
I dread when contract renewals come around and I see Fujitsu have bidded, I know they will be a lot cheaper then everyone else and so will probably win, I have moved jobs once for this reason, to avoid having to deal with Fujitsu, I just wish the Civil Service were more robust in insisting on certified (not that that means much) staff like they used to from companies wishing to bid for work.
"I know Prof Ross Anderson can come across as a bit strident sometimes"
For those not in the know, that'll be this chap:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/
With all due respect to Eclectic Man, and with all possible sympathy to those wrongly convicted (and to their families etc) maybe a bit of stridentness would have been useful in this appalling picture. Stridentness combined with demonstrable competence (such as RJA clearly has) might have been even more useful.
I concur. I did meet and have a chat* with Prof Roger Needham once after a conference in the states. He spoke very highly of Ross Anderson.
*I bought him a coffee at the airport as I could claim it on expense and he was a poverty stricken academic. Prof Needham was flying home via Paris as it was cheaper to go from the USA to the UK via France than direct, like me.
It's even worse than that. Their own lawyers told them they were breaching their legal obligations as prosecutors by not disclosing documentation, so they shredded some things and stopped writing things down in the hope this would either prevent the creation of more documentation they would have to disclose or at least hide the fact they failed to disclose it.
"Startling" is the strongest word the Court of Appeal has for prosecutorial conduct and they use it repeatedly.
As technology becomes a bigger and bigger part of all our lives, the legal system needs to gear up to deal with technology based cases - judges, lawyers, the CPS, the police, everyone.
I cannot understand how anyone was convicted on the premise that an IT system was infallible. There ain't no such animal, and it should have been easy to find qualified people to testify to this.
Clearly many people failed individually, and many behaved dishonestly and corruptly (but not the sub post masters). However the legal system as a whole failed. Nobody in the system saw the hundreds of prosecutions of previously upstanding citizens, and nobody challenged the nonsensical and self serving testimony of witnesses who said that Horizon always worked.
Lock up the post office execs who are responsible, but also set up legal infrastructure so that this sort of thing can never happen again
Part of the problem was that the union, who should have properly questioned this didn't.
If you listen to the BBC investigation it does go into why this was.
I am not a great union lover but this is exactly the kind of area where a properly organised union should be working for its members to engage the expertise necessary to defend them. And this is a proper function of a union to protect its members from malicious activity.
It should have been relatively obvious to a union that either their members had got 100x more dishonest than before or that something was very, very wrong.
>It should have been relatively obvious to a union that either their members had got 100x more dishonest than before or that something was very, very wrong.
One source indicated that the PO 'sudden' found 700+ SPM's being 'dishonest' after a Horizon system update - that alone should have raised questions about the accuracy of the system data.
So far I have only heard that the Horizon system and what the Sub Postoffice Managers records and money collected were inconsistent. But there is a third party here - the customer. I wonder why they did not try to reconcile either account with the customer's account to see which was correct. After all, if my records show that I deposited £2,000 in an account, and the SPM records show £2,000 and Horizon does not, then it is pretty clear that it is Horizon at fault.
As Miscarriages of Justice go this one certainly seems to have had so many things go wrong, get lied about, not get investigated or explained that if you'd written it as fiction it would have been considered too far- fetched to be remotely believable.
"if my records show that I deposited £2,000 in an account, and the SPM records show £2,000 and Horizon does not, then it is pretty clear that it is Horizon at fault."
Have a read about what "suspense accounts" are used for in accounting in general.
The same concept exists in the Horizon disaster but hasn't been covered much in the bits of techy press that I've seen so far, and I've not generally been reading the accounting coverage.
"so many things go wrong, get lied about, not get investigated or explained that if you'd written it as fiction it would have been considered too far- fetched to be remotely believable."
A bit like having a set of MPs, Cabinet Ministers, SPADs, "business leaders", etc that were corrupt to the core AND NOBODY SEEMED TO CARE.
The BBC radio series covers a bit of this, as do a few websites (search for horizon nfsp and you might find some).
The National Federation of Sub Postmasters was historically the chosen union for sub postmasters but for reasons not yet explained in public largely chose to side with the Post Office management on this topic. As of November 2020 the NFSP were standing by that position.
There was a bit of a breakaway movement amongst some sub postmasters, who chose to have the Communication Workers Union act on their behalf. The CWU has a "no NDA" policy for its officers and stuck to it in discussions re Horizon, conveniently allowing some interesting details to be legitimately covered in public when the Post Office team revealed proposed settlement details in one particular case without actually checking that the CWU rep had signed the NDA.
Further reading on e.g. Nick Wallis's blog:
https://www.postofficetrial.com/2021/04/confidential-mediation-post-office-style.html
You do need to put this in context a bit. There were more than 700 prosecutions of subpostmasters over this time. This appeal dealt with 42 of them. The court allowed three to stand and quashed the convictions of 39 others, but based on the summaries of the cases given in the judgement, it seems likely that some of those 39 were guilty. These convictions were not quashed on the grounds that the defendants can be shown to be innocent, but on the grounds that the process used to convict them was grossly unfair. That doesn't make them innocent.
These 42 were referred to the court of appeal by the criminal cases review commission because they were the ones where convictions seemed most likely to be unsafe; three of them were allowed to stand because their convictions didn't depend on Horizon data. It seems likely, then, that the 700-odd other prosecutions were also based on evidence other than Horizon data. What I'm getting at is that these convictions didn't just happen out of the blue, but as part of a much larger number of prosecutions where the defendants probably were guilty.
When you see 39 subpostmasters have their convictions quashed in a group, its easy to wonder how no-one saw the pattern; when those are less than 5% of the prosecutions of subpostmasters over that time, it's a lot easier to understand how they seemed to fit into a different pattern.
the PO execs responsible?
It aint gonna happen, most will have either moved on or more likely gone into retirement by now.
And by the time the laws courts/government inquiry reports back to the CPS , most of the execs will be dead of old age with the rest being 'too old to prosecute'
Then the PO will put out a statement about lessons will be learned and whole lot shoved under the carpet and forgotten about.
I don't think it's so much the PO senior management as their own in house lawyers and Fujitsu staff that need hauling before the beak.
You could take your choice from perjury, withholding evidence, contempt of course or attempting to pervert the course of justice (or to be entirely fair temporarily succeeding).
Yes, they have a claim under the Corporate Manslaughter Act.
Or more precisely once they have proved manslaughter getting compensation should be straightforward.
Normally this would be styled by insurers but I suspect PO will have used its Crown status to self insure.
Give it
a) has a reverse burden of proof; and
b) PO have admitted what they have done
There should be a lot of good lawyers prepared to help on a no win no fee basis.
Yes and what is sickening is the Fujitsu will mostly likely get off because they will hide behind the Post Office.
Fujitsu need to taking to court and made a very public example of to all the other big outfits that have their fingers in the pies of "public service organisation".
Whilst the fine and compensation from Fujitsu should be very large it should not be so much they go bust is probably making things worse. It also needs to be Fujitsu paying, not insurers.
I think Computer Weekly was quite involved with running on this story back in the day. So many are culpable for this sh1t show, as even when it was known years ago that the PO was talking horse shit and knew about the issues, other senior PO staff not involved with the initial lies continued with the cover-up.
I have no doubt that the spineless managers at any point told their customer 'no' when they were asked to inject false records.
In all fairness, Fujitsu have some great staff, but are well known for paying below what their competitors and I truly hope that Fujitsu are held as much account as the Post Office is, they are after all responsible for delivering an account system that could count correctly.
Having been subjected to having to use some of their systems, used a help desk staff by them and worked on a project with them, God help anyone who gives them a contract.
But they are currently winning everything they are bidding for, not that I doubt their bid teams efforts and proposals, but the price that they come in at undercutting even their most ferociously priced competition.
I am glad there is some light at the end for the victims, but for those who have lost everything, the families of those who have tried, and succeeded, to commit suicide, the families split and for all the years these people have lost, and all because of a few managers and staff who had no ethical bone in their bodies.
There will be cheering outside of any court for any perjury case that arises from this.
The staff at companies like Fujitsu are generally just doing their best to get the jobs done and keep the customers happy but the managers are doing their best to make a big bonus at the end of the year and don't care about the staff. Work in that environment, discover and report problems like these and you will be looking for another job the next day.
I worked for an ICL division back in 1995-1998. I was young and very wet behind the ears, but looking back I can see a very unhealthy management system.
I can fully believe that there would have been massive pressure to get stuff done. The senior management wanted to try to prove to Fujitsu that their purchase of ICL was justified - but they had no clue how to do that.
The management would no doubt blame unions and 1970's working practices. But when I started with them I didn't realise that the empty building over the other side of the car park was also owned by ICL. And that the huge building across the road was - you guessed it - owned by ICL. I was told that the joke in the UK IT industry was that ICL should just quit doing IT and become landlords, as they had so many assets sitting unused. So I think it's fair to say that it couldn't have just been the employees.
Personally nothing demonstrates the dysfunction of ICL like the time I was removed from the org chart for six months and didn't have a manager. Genuinely. I was living the dream! If the dream is having no support and doing everything on a shoestring...
I just kept doing my job, and then one day someone arrived looking for me and my colleagues because they wanted to know what we did and why ICL was paying us. This had happened simply because a manager wanted to cut their costs, and did so by removing us from the paperwork as much as they could...
Sadly this meant I did get a manager. We queried the grapevine, and it turned out he'd been involved in a failing project 200 miles away, and we were very probably his punishment. He seemed to have no intention of moving and was simply driving down and staying in hotels every week. How very cost effective!
Remember, this would all have been at the time that they were doing the early development and test rollouts of Horizon.
I have no idea what ICL/Fujitsu is like now. But I do know that a friend of mine worked at the same site after I left, and the stories he told didn't make me think it got any better.
Thanks for reminding everyone that while the company might be "Fujitsu" its not really a Japanese computer company so much as the rump of ICL -- primarily the software staff -- redeployed writing applications primarily for government.
My earliest jobs were at ICL (West Gorton) and the description of the management as dysfunctional rings true, you had a lot of good people getting stuff done despite the organization, not because of it. I left for greener pastures but an old friend stayed until he retired a few years ago. From what he said about the place last time I visited it seems not much had changed in the culture. Sad really -- that was our computer industry, properly funded and developed it should have been able to take on, or even over, companies like Fujistsu, not be bought by them for spare parts and customers.
(West Gorton itself is a metaphor for the company as a whole. As a Ferranti plant it worked closely with Manchester University in the early days of computing, jointly developing some leading edge kit. By the 70s as ICL it was getting very set in its ways; most of the buildings, originally an old ironworks, wasn't in that that good condition. In recent years its been demolished and the site redeveloped as a set of movie studios used for making lower budget films and TV soap operas.)
ICL did some very good work at West Gorton (MAN05) - I worked there for about 12 years from the mid 80’s.
There was an undercurrent of unhappiness among some driven by a trade union trying to justify its existence. The bigger problem was that MAN05 had to finance the rest of ICL by selling its (excellent) mainframes. It was always beholden to the inept southern management. Therein lies the real story behind Horizon.
When ICL started to suffer in the mid to late 90s with a self inflicted decline in mainframe sales driven by totally stupid sales management and made worse by ICL’s very expensive unix and PC boxes (which never made a profit, ever), it decided to move into services.
The question was where to find the people to make those services happen. The answer was to tap the “resource pool” which was full of people that ICL could not afford to make redundant, but managers were not willing to have in their projects because they were useless.
ICL decided to set up a “centre of excellence” where all the, er, less than excellent, people went. This is where Horizon was born. It’s interesting that Horizon was seen by some as the saviour of the company - yet I suspect more revenue and profit still comes from the VME business over 20 years later ...
One key question for ICL / Fujitsu is why it did not use the expertise it had in MAN05 to build a high integrity system? This is what MAN05 was known for ... but the intra-ICL politics ensured that no knowledge was transferred as the game was to treat MAN05 as “legacy” and that no-one there could possibly understand how to build something “modern”.
The answer? Well, the “centre of excellence” was “partnered” with Microsoft ... and as a result MAN05 was deliberately ignored. The results speak for themselves - Horizon is a system that is not fit for purpose, and never was going to be. It was built by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
Fujitsu held the contract to provide some infrastructure support including web site hosting and maintenance. I was told they charged £16,000 per page to make a change. Don't know if it was true; do know that the two contractors who worked for them onsite were so embarrassed by the whole process that if you took them out for a drink or three they would make the changes without billing it.
I tried to claim the drinks on my business account - explaining to my accountant just how much money I was saving the government; sadly he said "No".
They should have money extracted from them to just above the point where they become a burden on the state. Houses gone, pension gone, shares & savings gone, ...
Why ?
Execs elsewhere will see this and think "oh, shit, maybe I should not do things like this!"
Although I expect that execs elsewhere will see this and put layers of obfuscation between themselves & their deeds to protect their own bacon: probably by pushing the blame on to others.
Looks like Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers have been referred to the CPS for possible charges of perjury from the Judge.
"At a hearing at the Court of Appeal on 18th November 2020, it was revealed that in his letter Mr Justice Fraser has referred two former IT experts for Fujitsu Gareth Jenkins, 68, and Anne Chambers, 63, to the Crown Prosecution Service. Mr Jenkins and Mrs Chambers gave evidence for the prosecution against subsequently convicted postmasters, and the Metropolitan Police is now investigating whether they committed perjury in misleading those trials."
https://www.rosenblatt-law.co.uk/media/metropolitan-police-post-office-scandal-rosenblatts-financial-crime-team/
That is Paula Vennells, CBE, thank you very much:
"Standing for Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the CBE is the highest ranking Order of the British Empire award (excluding a knighthood/damehood), followed by OBE and then MBE.
The CBE is awarded to individuals for having a prominent role at national level, or a leading role at regional level. CBEs are also awarded for distinguished and innovative contribution to any area."
From https://www.thegazette.co.uk/awards-and-accreditation/content/103372
Well she certainly has a 'prominent role at national level' now.
Curiously Marcus Rashford (lets actually feed poor children all year round) only rated an MBE, I know who I'd rather be stuck in a lift with.
He probably gifted Cameron and his sister some shares,.it clearly works on Hancock. Christ its about time we insist took every mp, MEP, councillor, senior civil servant, police chief, CEO, every ex one of those and jailed them throwing way the key. They whine about corruption in the 3rd world but it's got fuck all on the filthy smelly corruption in the UK
At the risk of incurring more downvotes, may I point out that we are frequently told that we should judge people from past times by the morals of their day. Slavery, oppression of women, child labour, invading other countries and stealing their resources under the guise of 'civilising the natives' were all 'accepted then', it seems. Except that each religion claims to get its code of ethics 'from God' (or Gods). So if their religious ethics are eternal how can they claim they should be judged by the ethics of the time?
(Answers on a postcard to ... )
This is probably the most shocking IT scandal I can remember, the 100's of lives and careers ruined is hard to get your head around.
No mention here that Horizon was an ICL system, they won the contract in 1996 and got bought in 2002. They produced a buggy P.O.S system and Fujitsu doubled down on the incompetence and fraud by maintaining it was bug free.
The Post Office execs pushed the prosecutions and the lawyers did the rest, one particularly nasty aspect was PostMasters who pled guilty having been told charges would be dropped only to then be prosecuted based on pleading guilty.
Its probably too late to successfully prosecute the cowards and liars that led to this but Fujitsu should be completely banned from any future Government contracts.
If you are stupid enough as a private company to use them so be it but no tax payers money should be sent their way.
The legal profession comes out on top, as usual, £46m of legal fees which eats up most of the compensation, that should be refunded 100%.
If ICL had just fixed their buggy crap none of this would have happened.
@ Colinb
Iff memory serves I.C.L. started working with Fujitsu in the early 80's. By 1996 they were controlled by Fujitsu. I.C.L was effectively dead for quite some time before then. The purchase was just a formality.
I have not so fond memories of their "one per desk" computers. Complete with microdrive or what ever it was called. Ours was so useless I am convinced it was an early prototype. At least no one where I worked owned up to buying the bloody thing.
"The legal profession comes out on top, as usual, £46m of legal fees which eats up most of the compensation, that should be refunded 100%."
You will rarely hear me defend legal bill but I will break the habit of a lifetime.
If it had not been for the legal team that pursued this in a Civil claim and won most of the evidence would never have seen the light of day.
Once the evidence was there in the Civil claim and a High Court Judge had seen it and said it all hung together then it set off the Criminal Review Board to put this in front of the High Court for the Criminal convictions to be quashed. Which then rapidly were.
Significantly the way they were quashed also opens the possibility for more compensation for those wrongly convicted. So yes the lawyers had £46m but they took on the PO, with close to infinite state resources, who threw every trick in the book at obfuscating the process, as the Judge noted quite acidly.
HMG has admitted that it will be paying out a lot of money and will stand behind the bill. So hopefully that gets resolved. I suspect it will get resolved sooner rather then later as it is the only way to shut of the stench.
I would rather focus effort on the prosecution of the PO's/Fujitsu's perjury, persecution teams.
Yes, I guess that unlike some countries there is a chance the legal system can right the wrongs but the wrongs were inflicted by that same system.
It just highlights the extreme effort and cost it takes to overturn even obviously flawed trials.
This judgement gives these people their reputation back but ignores the material damage to their lives.
Not awarding costs and making the PO (and unfortunately the taxpayer) pay just seems morally wrong and compounds the hurt.
If charges could be laid and won that would be a fantastic signal to people who push malicious prosecutions without thinking, a slim chance but worth doing anyway.
"If ICL had just fixed their buggy crap none of this would have happened."
Maybe. However that buggy crap would still have been overseen by the same shower of negligent, self-serving, lying scumbags. So maybe not. If the buggy code got fixed, the corrupt and dysfunctional management(?) procedures and oversight that allowed this scandal to happen would still have been in place. In fact, they still are. The only material change to date is that evil weasel Paula Vennels has been replaced with someone who has been forced to apologise for her crimes and wilful negligence.
None of this would have happened if the Post Office wasn't its own judge, jury and executioner. If the Post Office's "evidence" had been tested by the proper independent third parties (ie the police and CPS ), none of these prosecutions could ever have made it to court. And the truth about Horizon's epic fails would have emerged far, far sooner than they did.
Fujitsu should be completely banned from any future Government contracts.
Sadly the precedent for this is not good. Otherwise Crapita* wouldn't have any work to be getting on with.
*Substitute name of failed incompetent outsourcer still getting tons of gov work, of your choice.
If the PO were claiming that the postmasters has committed fraud, was wasn't all the evidence they had handed to the police to investigate? Surely it should be up to the police and CPS to decide when the evidence has been independently investigated if there are criminal charges to be brought?
It clearly not an impartial judicial system if companies can be the ones who decide if prosecuting their staff for criminal charges goes ahead without independent scrutiny of the evidence.
Quote
"If the PO were claiming that the postmasters has committed fraud, was wasn't all the evidence they had handed to the police to investigate? Surely it should be up to the police and CPS to decide when the evidence has been independently investigated if there are criminal charges to be brought?"
No because the post office had the power to do everything in house without the need for the police or CPS to get involved.
They had the evidence, then prosecuted the staff, while not giving the defence anything to go on apart from "our IT system is never wrong" despite there being internal evidence that that statement was a lie
So it wasn't a fair trial. There should have been a requirement from the defence that the source code, tests and test results should be made available for independent scrutiny, with time for that to be performed. Not only should the company bosses and legal teams be going to jail but their is a lot to be said for jailing the original incompetent defence teams and the software departments who kept their mouths shut while innocent people paid with their lives for the piss poor ethics and cosing
It seems a lot of this could have been stopped at the very beginning by ending the stupid practice of allowing those with power and money to conduct private prosecutions of those they want to go after.
If this isn't the perfect example of why you can't allow private rich corporations and people to use the law as their own private weapon, I don't know what else would make the point?
The amount paid out to the victims of this horrible fraud is insultingly low and nobody seems to be talking about that.
All the high and mighty judges that were so eager to be vindictive need to personally go and offer groveling apologies to every single innocent victim they sentenced and then put in some real work towards making things right and making sure those responsible for the fraud get proper punishment on par with the suffering they caused by their greed.
Perhaps a ban on Fujitsu doing any more work at all in the UK until all the victims have been fully compensated for the destruction of their lives would be in order. If Fujitsu thinks it's too tough, well they can sue the post office...
The idea of banning private prosecutions is without doubt or exception the most stupid suggestion that I have ever read.
A "private prosecution" is literally any prosecution launched by anybody other than the state. Let's say I suggest that you are a child molester and get a national newspaper to print these deliberately false accusations which causes you to lose your job.
You would no longer have any ability to use the criminal justice system to gain recourse by suing me because that would be a "private prosecution" which you'd banned.
You would have effectively have near totally abolished the rule of law. Contracts would no longer be enforceable. If your employer decides he's not going to pay you anymore? You can't take him to court and demand payment. You supply goods and somebody refuses to pay? No recourse.
The issue with these prosecutions is not that the Post Office were allowed to bring these prosecutions, it is that the people responsible for the prosecutions have behaved illegally, and the solution is to apply the law.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/25/section/3
Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996
(1)The prosecutor must—
(a)disclose to the accused any prosecution material which has not previously been disclosed to the accused and which might reasonably be considered capable of undermining the case for the prosecution against the accused of assisting the case for the accused , or
(b)give to the accused a written statement that there is no material of a description mentioned in paragraph (a).
So here is a simple case; the prosecution did not comply with A, and they committed perjury in providing the statement at B. They have broken literally dozens of laws and gratuitously abused every underlying principle of how the Criminal Justice System works by their misconduct.
The solution to this is not abolishing the law, it is to prosecute every person who was involved to the maximum extent possible of the law, and in every case to hit them with the maximum possible penalties.
You are confusing civil and criminal law. No one is proposing that you you should no longer allowed to bring a civil claim against someone (e.g. for libel), only that criminal prosecutions should continue to be handled by the police and the CPS - as the vast majority already are. It's only due to a quirk of the current set-up that a few organisations such as the PO, the RSPCA and the train companies do their own private prosecutions - with big conflicts of interest as the the victim, the investigating authority and the prosecuting authority are all now the same organisation.
There are a few historical anomalies in UK law where non-government organisations have the ability to set and prosecute laws (byelaws?). IANL but I think the UK railways had this right from the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 so these things have been around for a while and I suspect unpicking the mess of laws and incorporating and aligning them with mainstream law would be a length and therefore costly business and so I suspect that it's a case of "too expensive, ignore it".
The PO prosecuted those people, not Fujitsu.
Fujitsu’s system was faulty but Fujitsu didn’t prosecute the postmasters.
The PO has special powers to prosecute people, a bit like the RSPCA and other entities have special powers to ruin you if they want.
For all the blame heaped on senior managers - and richly deserved - how many IT staff the the PO and Fujitsu knew of the problems and the false prosecutions and did precisely nothing about it? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Everyone from programmers to help desk staff must have know what was going on.
"how many IT staff the the PO and Fujitsu knew of the problems and the false prosecutions and did precisely nothing about it?"
I'm paid to work in IT. I'm not paid to stand in front of a tank.
I know one whistleblower who quit his job and went public about some really dark deeds at his employer. They threatened him. They started legal action against him for invented misconduct. They discredited him and then tried to destroy him personally and financially. Whatever it might take to shut him down.
The story was cancelled several times, but did eventually come out, and it was a severe black eye to the company. A clear conscience was his only reward for enduring that punishment. That, and being able to find work again.
Look at what the PO did to those postmasters. What would they not do to stop someone who could blow down their whole house?
>I'm paid to work in IT. I'm not paid to stand in front of a tank.
Not a valid defense.
There are employees of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu who knew Horizon was a faulty, who could very easily have supplied the various journalist and defense legal teams with anonymous tips and leaks.
In today's world, perhaps the new legal team will use a freedom of information request to gain the names of all people who worked on Horizon at ICL/Fujitsu and PO and publish them as part of the court record.
If everyone keeps their mouth shut and turns away from right then evil wins. That's why we have MPs and civil servants getting paid for NHS contracts, we have prime minister's going to war for personal vendettas and killing people, CEOs prosecuting the innocent, shit defence councils not defending and the whole disgusting mess of corruption which is all that is left of a once decent country
In case you're wondering what a Church of England priest has to do with this; the Reverend Vennells was the CEO of the Post Office at the time its employees were being prosecuted.
Vennells got £5 million and a CBE for her services to the Post Office and went on to chair Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (she stepped down this month for 'personal reasons'. She also went to work for the Cabinet Office and directorships at Morrisons and Dunelms (worth another £170k a year).
Currently, she is still a minister in the CofE which has taken no action against her and sits on the Ethical Investment Advisory Group of the Church of England.
From the Book of Common Prayer: And if any of those be an open and notorious evil liver, so that ye congregacion by him is offended, or have done any wrong to hys neighbours by word or dede ye curate havyng knowledge therof, shal cal hym, and advertyse hym, in any wise not to presume to the Lordes table, until he have openly declared him self to have truely repented, and amended his former naughty lyfe, that the Congregacion may therby be satisfyed, which afore were offended, and that he have recompensed the parties, who he hath done wrong unto, or at the least declare him selfe to be in full purpose so to doe, as sane as he conveniently may.
The IT staff and managers should have owned up immediately NOT 10 years later.
I would NEVER let someone be prosecuted if I new it was based on a lie.
As for the lawyers involved each should be struck off they apparently knew what they did was wrong, maybe put them in front of the same judges they misled and see the judgment passed on them.
Finally I do believe a name and shame for ALL of those involved.
Full compensation, each SPM PM should be treated as if they had perfect careers and successful businesses and they should be paid out accordingly.
I am so glad that they finally have their justice.
"I would NEVER let someone be prosecuted if I new it was based on a lie."
I would have tried my best to help and make the right noises but once things go 4 layers up the food chain what can you do? Unless you are in the top 2 or 3 layers of the management structure there is only so much you can really do.
>I would have tried my best to help and make the right noises but once things go 4 layers up the food chain what can you do?
Brown envelope to the defense legal team or better still one of the journalists covering the case who would have the entire force of the free press behind them protecting their sources from disclosure.
"Brown envelope to the defense legal team or better still one of the journalists covering the case"
Journalists in no particular order: Nick Wallis (former BBC employee), Computer Weekly, Private Eye.
https://twitter.com/nickwallis/status/1385519498107699202
Much much respect is due.
Ask yourself, dear reader: what chance of achieving something similar in the UK in 2021?
Suppose something similar were to happen now?
"the entire force of the free press behind them"
Really? Where?
"protecting their sources from disclosure"
Isn't that largely ineffective in the UK nowadays too, and quite likely to become illegal ?
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2020/07/24/tories-want-new-law-that-could-punish-journalists-and-whistleblowers-with-14-years-in-jail/
>Isn't that largely ineffective in the UK nowadays too, and quite likely to become illegal ?
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2020/07/24/tories-want-new-law-that-could-punish-journalists-and-whistleblowers-with-14-years-in-jail/
Not ineffective yet, I anticipate journalists will fight this.
Yet another Brexit dividend - with 'Parliament' aka the Conservative party sovereign, there is no longer a higher authority you or I can appeal to, that can remind Westminster of their democratic obligations...
Whilst the Conservatives are probably the worst in terms of wanting authoritarian control, Labour aren't unknown for attempting similar - it would seem authoritarianism is part of the English political malaise...
FS was responsible for costing me over £400 back in the day as they were one of the manufacturers who used "sneaky" BIOS's on their laptops.
These also stopped upgrading of the memory, Wifi card and other such nastiness, even preventing me copying data off the drive when it was time to upgrade.
This sort of behavior is despicable, at least Apple are nice enough to tell people up front that special memory and SSDs are needed.
(IIRC this is due to the thermal sensor in the SPD chip on older SODIMMs)
Between that and locking it to Vista this was the only time I ever purchased anything made by this company.
If the CONservative Party had any sense of decency and ethics they'd retroactively exonerate every postmaster prosecuted for Horizon related "fraud" and "theft".
Always remember who was in charge when this atrocity happened.
What we need is a "Turing Law" style mass pardoning of all postmasters affected by this, back to to the earliest pay period when they were originally accused.
As of this morning I am looking for a new job, as its simply not ethically acceptable to benefit financially from an organization that has no ethical code and
trusts a computer over a human.
Perhaps nuclear physics is a better option?
Oh I agree totally.
Given how very malicious PO’s actions have been **everything** needs to be assumed as being dubious.
As the 39’s convictions appear to have been obtained by a mix of perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Any evidence given by those same PO prosecution team individuals has to be of doubtful value.
I read the entire verdict, all 92 pages of it.
The 3 who had their convictions upheld had completely different stories. In this instance I think their lawyers had just jumped on the Horizon bandwagon. The verdict went into massive detail as to why these 3 did not fit the pattern of the others.
Curious reading the bug list. Some of these bugs are serious and eye opening.
Apparently if you make a transaction, it can appear like the process has finished, but if you press the 'logout' button while this transaction is still processing in the background, when you next login it attempts to duplicate the transaction and records both lines in the finance records.
Ultimately those duplicated lines being the "evidence" in several cases. If management knew about that and still prosecuted......
But God, you have to cringe reading the "settlement", of the £58m in "damages" paid by the post office, only £12m goes to the victims. The lawyers skimmed off the rest. Champagne for legal partners!
The duplicated lines should be pretty easy to find. Most audit/accounting software has a function to scan for those as it is a favoured way of fraudsters to do things by reposting the same invoice a few times.
I am guessing that is what Second Sight spotted early on and also the trails of people logging into to manually adjust the duplicated lines.
It would not have taken a genius to spot this as it would not have accorded with the keystroke records from the terminals.
Further you might well have had reboot/login/logout timings from the syslog to then compare to where the errors showed up.....if I am getting the gist of how this system worked.
Kudos to Second Sight and the relevant barrister for having stood up to this and called it out. But also Kudos to the civil claim lawyers who proved that PO and Fujitsu were up to no good.
"Apparently if you make a transaction, it can appear like the process has finished, but if you press the 'logout' button while this transaction is still processing in the background, when you next login it attempts to duplicate the transaction and records both lines in the finance records.
Ultimately those duplicated lines being the "evidence" in several cases. If management knew about that and still prosecuted......"
Guess they never heard of idempotency when creating the NFR's for the Horizon system.
On a previous el-reg story on this subject, I did say that looking at the transactions 'bug' , it was clear that the designers had not made it resilient to any trouble in transmission.
Almost as if they had missed Bacon's work on distributed concurrent systems(a dire book inflicted on those of us doing hons level computery science at the OU )
The PO suits merely acted on the evidence from fujitsu about horizons, but then the suits from there would have been more concerned about keeping the PO contract rather than the truth of the matter in that horizons was'nt worth shit.
So senior manglement from both companies with their experts should be in the dock explaining to the beaks why they mantained the fiction that horizons was perfect
"These statements didn't stop it from awarding Fujitsu a £42m extension to the Horizon contract a fortnight ago."
Hardly surprising, I would lay money on any other systems integrator either quoting an extremely high price to perform systematic due diligence before agreeing to a run contract... or just qualify it out at the first review.
Too much risk, too tainted and it isn't a platform that could be leveraged to resell into other postal systems...
Hell yes. The PO are in quite a bind here.
This is a system with proven past problems. As the AC says, any incoming supplier would have to assume a huge risk and enormous amount of work, so the £££ would be very high. Replacing it from scratch ditto.
However, replacement of this should have started a long time ago. With someone who isn't Fujitsu.
When will we actually get real justice in this country . It is clear that the post office and Fujitsu lied on oath. They have deprived people of their livelihood, good name and freedom. The only acceptable course is to jail the CEOs and ctos of both companies, the witnesses and fine both companies a collosal amount. The CEO and CTO take massive payments and bonuses because they claim they are needed for the companies massive profits and their expert guidance when things go well, the flip side should be bought painfully home that when things go wrong it is therefore also their responsibility. Jail time and massive compensation and fines all round. I would like to see the boards of both companies in the paupers house and the companies finiahed
I will try to find a link... In the early days of Horizon, it was suggested that the system could not be trusted if it was not throughly audited and a company specilising in auditing of accountancy systems was hired by the PO to check the system and provide a report. When the PO discovered that the report was not entirely rosy, they paid the company and tried to bury the report - but the company published the report on their own website. They listed numerous issues with Horizon, which would need to be addressed before it could be considered trustworthy.
(different AC here)
Are you perhaps thinking of Second Sight's investigations and reports?
Have a look at e.g.
https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/12/second-sights-ron-warmington-breaks-his.html
Even if it wasn't Second Sight you were thinking of, it's worth a read.
ICL was the bright idea of Viscount Stansgate back in the 1960's. Take all of the UKs most successful computer companies, force them to merge, and produce a company that was as successful and dynamic as British Leyland. Another of Viscount Stansgate's bright ideas.
You remember Viscount Stansgate ? a.k.a Antony Wedgwood Benn. a.k.a Tony Benn. The man who single-handedly destroyed whole sectors of the British economy.
Even by the early 1970's it was obvious that ICL was a catastrophe. The stories of the posters above about the dysfunctional management decades later were already well known in the industry by the mid-1970's so the crisis and bail out in the early 1980's was no surprise to anyone. By the 1990's Fujitsu owned it all. The problem was once the British Leyland mindset management had established itself in the company in the 1970s' nothing short of a complete liquidation of the company was going to shift them. The good people in a company may ebb and flow over time but bad management will remain to the bitter end.
So quite separate from the Post Office guilty parties Fujitsu (ICL) should just be liquidated by this stage. Closed down. I am sure the competent technical people will find other jobs easily. And the bottom feeding slime management will no doubt find other perches from which to spread their poison. They always do. Although it would be nice if the most egregiously guilty in this case spent some time in jail too.
But that might be asking for too much.
From reading this
https://lawyerwatch.wordpress.com/2021/04/23/the-post-office-where-were-the-lawyers-post/
it looks like the Post Office and (hopefully) a number of senior staff are (hopefully) in deep trouble
excerpt
The first Clarke advice is dated 15 July 2013. In it Mr Clarke set out the duties of an expert witness and the prosecution’s disclosure duties (noted above). He came to “an employee of Fujitsu, Gareth Jenkins, [who] had provided expert evidence as to the operation and integrity of Horizon” in a number of cases. In his witness statements Mr Jenkins had said there was nothing wrong with the system. Clarke’s advice was that, “Unfortunately that was not the case, certainly between the dates spanned by the statements….” And,
“that Mr Jenkins had been aware of at least two bugs which had affected Horizon Online since September 2010, one of which was still extant and would not be remedied before October 2013, but had failed to say anything about them or about any Horizon issues in his statements. He expressed the firm opinion that if Mr Jenkins had mentioned the existence of the bugs, that would undoubtedly have required to be disclosed to any defendant who raised Horizon issues as part of his or her defence.”
/excerpt
... so it can be shown the Post office was corporately aware by June '13 knowingly incomplete evidence had been given and evidence of innocence had not been disclosed to the defendants by the post office lawyers.
There was also a reference in the article to the Post Office layers deliberately destroying evidence that pointed to innocence.
I hope the CPS looks into this and sees there is a case of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice across a wide range of people in the PO and Fujitsu at all levels.
... and how on earth did or does a private entity get to prosecute anyone for anything other than civil (contract law) issues. This is why we have police (and PACE ) and the CPS
This looks like a widespread conspiracy
Therium funded the litigation against the Post Office, and its probable that without that, the good work of all involved in bringing it to light wouldn't have succeeded as it has.
Therium fund stuff like this for a profit, so it's them who got the bulk of the initial settlement. I'm not keen on it, but I'm happy to be enlightened on any other way the appeal could have been funded.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476622/Why-subpostmasters-are-calling-on-the-government-to-pay-Horizon-trial-costs
Something that has puzzled me about this affair and I haven't seen any explanation, is the distribution of the errors in the Horizon system. It seems that a (relatively) small number of subpostmasters was affected really badly, but many not at all. Why didn't the problem affect all subpostoffices equally? Or were they all affected to some extent, but in most cases the deficits were below some threshold for taking action, or balanced by unexpected surpluses?
Reasonable question.
A significant part of the answer would be related to the lack of robustness in the system's design, and in particular, its limited ability to recover correctly from connectivity issues. The sub post offices are online courtesy of BT's tin cans and string, which in some parts of the UK wasn't/isn't particularly reliable. Is there such a thing a half a transaction when the connectivity fails? How well does error recovery work in this distributed database? It's not rocket science.
It's been written about years ago, and I presume it's in the in-depth Horizon coverage that is still around.
There may be other relevant reasons too but that's the one I used to know about.
Some or all of it could be behaviour related.
For instance the bug listed in the comment where logging off before a transaction is completed - a post master who diligently logged off when they finished might trigger this, whereas one who left themselves permanently logged in wouldn't.
Paula Vennells has stepped down from several jobs:
"Rev Paula Vennells, the former head of the Post Office, has resigned from the boards of the supermarket chain Morrisons and retailer Dunelm after the court of appeal quashed the wrongful convictions of dozens of staff at her former employer.
...
Vennells has also stepped back from her duties as a minister at the Church of St Owen near Bedford, in the diocese of St Albans, calling the scandal a “distraction”. She has already quit roles with the NHS and Cabinet Office."
from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/26/post-office-paula-vennells-quits-morrisons-dunelm-boards
This will one day make one helluva movie. So unbelievable it happened, so many failures, with the courts, lawyers, unions, directors, witnesses and of course Fujitsu who failed to stand up and say our software may be unreliable ..
Everybody involved should hold their heads in shame !
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