Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in 'dream world' over Horizon scandal The chief executive of the Post Office has agreed the organization's leadership team was living in a "dream world" in the months leading up to the launch of a statutory inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history. Appearing before the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Nick Read …
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This post has been deleted by its author
Post Office's/Fujitsu executives, board, managers at all levels complacent in unlawful prosecutions, fraud, suicides, destruction of lives should now be facing jail terms, massive finds and even personal prosecutions from the victims. Will it happen, no, some money will change hands, and they get away with it, to live happily on their massive pensions or go on to control other companies.
Only common people feel the full weight of justice !!
At a bare minimum, I want Fujitsu's expert witness Gareth Jenkins up on trial for perjury.
If we can't nail such a blatant abuse of expert witness privilege, then what hope do we have of getting the others with a fig leaf of deniability and diffused responsibility?
"I think it'd be impossible not to conclude that," Read said.
I know this is a minor thing but WTF is going on with commas and proof reading at El Reg? They seem to appear in the strangest of places, then go missing when needed. It's incredibly distracting to try and read articles full of grammatical errors.
It appears so. The example above is particularly jarring as the comma implies there's a section of the quote that's been omitted after the comma, but I googled and it seems that was the end of his sentence! I'd have thought even in American that would mean a full stop rather than a comma. As written it's read as "I think it'd be impossible not to conclude that, ..." and leaves the reader hanging wondering what conclusion was omitted.
I guess it's too much to hope that what is (or I guess was if it's been taken over) a British site writing about a British story and quoting someone in the UK could actual use the appropriate gamma. Can anyone recommend a site like The Register that's written in English? :-)
I am American and I certainly have never used that style of punctuation. It seems...strange to me, as to me the comma inside the quotes seems to associate the comma with the original speaker, not with the writer that is quoting and writing the line text.
Thanks to the internet everyone seems to be able to follow beliefs they pick up. One person makes a YouTube about something and now it's the rule of the world; one group decides that a single space is acceptable after a period and publishes it, and now it's both an acceptable writing style and a bone of contention. One idiot makes a theory that humans can control the weather and it's a plot to destroy conservative values and people believe that, too.
Apparently not so in British English, if the comma represents a full stop at the end of the quote.
I have a relative who works as a copy editor in the US and told me, a while back, that punctuation goes inside the quotes if it's part of the quote
"What time is it?" he asked.
and outside if it's part of the sentence containing the quote
"Half past six", she replied.
(USAian here) No, that's not American punctuation style. I'm reasonably sure that we and our cousins across the pond are in agreement on how this should be handled. At least, I can't recall having looked at a UK (or Australian or Canadian) quote and noticed a difference.
If we accept the (extremely dubious premise) that CEOs are amazingly skilled and industry savvy individuals (often overpaid inept grifters in my view) then surely Read would have done a bit of due diligence and being aware of the situation - it's not like Private Eye & Computer Weekly have not produced masses of coverage over the years.
If an employer fancies you for a job they will be often extolling the virtues of the company, and not shouting out all the potential problems.
So implies Read was not fit for purpose as CEO if he lacked the curiosity / diligence to investigate (pre job there was plenty of public data, and who knows what juicy info was available when in the CEO role)
Your average worker (I would hope so, my friends certainly do), going for interviews, for jobs paying a lot less than a CEO (but likely doing a lot more hard work) does some reading around about the company to find any possible red flags, be they financial, ethical, legal actions, whatever (varies on individual, most people would not fancy a financially unsound employer but some people happy to work for a non ethical company)
Precisely- what kind of idiot opts to apply to and accept running a major company - or even part of it- without bothering to find out about it properly.
And what kind of company interviews and appoints someone who hasn't bothered to do that.
(Somewhat rhetorical questions.)
"Precisely- what kind of idiot opts to apply to and accept running a major company - or even part of it- without bothering to find out about it properly."
You'll be surprised - the board and the existing management can hide a lot of things, even to a prospective CEO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_scandal
It is still a job application, even if a top-level one. They'll tell you want they want to.
"...what kind of idiot opts to apply to and accept running a major company - or even part of it- without bothering to find out about it properly."
One who is mainly concerned with maximising his pay packet, rather than running a successful business, apparently.
"And what kind of company interviews and appoints someone who hasn't bothered to do that."
One where the entire senior management team is more concerned with maximising their pay packets than running a successful business, apparently. It helps if the executive team barely engage with the board of directors, only one member of the board reports to the owner, and the actual owner has no say in how the business is run, but is there solely to pay for any losses which occur due to disastrous business decisions. That way everyone in senior management can ride the gravy train for as long as possible.
100% this.
By 2019 the story had been running for years already, including in this very rag, and it was very clear at this late stage that the Post Office were very much on the back foot and had been for some time.
Read literally couldn't have not known what was going on. For him to claim otherwise is just egregious cover-your-arse bullshit. Some people will say and do anything for money.
After the judgement was handed down, the board's reaction: "the most dreadful complacency … bordering on fearfulness of what might be found if they were properly investigated" is a great summary. It's difficult to believe that anyone senior in the Post Office, including those 'new' appointments, could have been unaware of the oncoming storm. At that point, their main concern was to avoid being tainted, and so they pretended and still maintain ignorance. Probably on advice from their own legal team who have absolutely no interest in matters being concluded.
It stinks, and they should all be ashamed.
It's theft and they are conspirators. Their salaries/bonuses/personal legal fees should be reclaimed as the proceeds of crime.
I worked for Fujitsu services as I needed some work, 6 months back in 2001. Passed the interview, turned up on day one and was told, "Between you and me, you do not think in this job. Forget all that crap they told you in the interview, you just do the bare minimum clients ask for and nothing more. You're not here to learn or progress, save your sanity for when you finally leave here in a year or two and get a better job!"
I've never worked for another services company in my life, it's like working in a straight-jacket. The people were great but the "lifers" were so unhappy there. They didn't have any drive, skills or wish to leave, I felt so sorry for them. We'd go out for drinks after work and you'd try to gee them up a bit, tell them they could make it better elsewhere but they're like those sad seaside donkeys, they could bite-the-hand-that-feeds but it's easier to just take the whipping from the stick and just keep carrying the 21st fat f**ks up the beach every hour, than cause any trouble.
Disagree, as somebody who was with them for over 20 years and in general a good career with helpful and knowledgeable team members. starting life as the lowest pc box installer, to becoming a mainframe/server engineer and they taught me a lot, yes I even worked on Pathways for the Post Orifice to my shame and even I knew it was "SHOUTING LOUDLY WITHOUT THE ABBREVIATION, FOOBAR" after a few days on the kit.
Its fairly clear that Nick Read was not the CEO the PO needed to right the wrongs of Horizon - you can check his pretty limited experience for such a high profile role on LinkedIn.
He gives no impression of being the Leader a broken and illegal organisation needs to force change upon it.
His continually obsession with his salary and perks sums him up.
You do have to wonder whom his backers were....
I continue to infer that the Post Office as an organisation, and its senior management, still believes that all the postmasters were guilty and are being let off on a technicality. That technicality is, of course, that there is no shred of credible evidence that cash even went missing, let alone that it was stolen, but acknowledging that might attract attention to bonuses and Swiss bank accounts of both PO and Fujitsu staff.
How nice it must have been to discover that you could transfer money out of a sub post office's accounts and that the sub post master would then replace it with their own and, when that ran out, go to gaol. A magical money tree indeed.
Exactly. I've yet to see any evidence from the Post Office's crack (as in the sense that's what they must have been smoking to be so deluded rather than a comment on their "abilities") investigations team as to where all the money that the accused sub-postmasters had supposedly stolen went to.
It's also a pretty damning indictment of whoever the sub-postmasters' lawyers were that they didn't seem to deem it worthy of their ludicrously expensive time to ask the Jerry Maguire question "Show me the money!!!". Without any real world money trail of them spaffing the cash on fast cars and loose men/women (or a day return to Edinburgh on the train if they really wanted to buy something with an extortionate price tag) at least some of the judiciary involved might have woken up and thought better of incarcerating the sub-postmasters.
The Post Office seems to have deliberately attempted to silo each case - to hide that implication. i.e one postmaster/mistress might have stolen a wad of cash and not used it, then concealed where it was hidden. Even a small number - possibly.
But a pattern of dozens of postmasters all suddenly going off the rails and nicking cash, none of them living extravagant life styles and all of them successfully being able to conceal the ill-gottens from the PO's experts is just too many levels of improbability.
And that leads to the inevitable conclusion that this went well beyond wilful and spiteful mistreatment of the postmasters to a cold criminal conspiracy.
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