They thought it was all over...
The news on this story is breaking so quickly it is hard to keep up. Read the latest post at https://www.postofficetrial.com/ referring to a statement issued today by the M.D. (Ron Warmington) of Second Sight - a company of forensic accountants that were commissioned by the PO back in 2013 to conduct an independent investigation They were then sacked at short notice when they obviously got far to close too the truth. Amongst other things, they believed that a lot of the so called losses at branch level ultimately found their way to the PO P&L.
Quoting his statement
"the Post Office has improperly enriched itself, through the decades, with funds that have passed through its own suspense accounts. Had its own staff more diligently investigated in order to establish who were the rightful owners of those funds, they would have been returned to them, whether they were Post Office’s customers or its Subpostmasters. When is the Post Office going to return the funds that, in effect, belonged to its Subpostmasters?"
He adds:
"It also seems to be clear now that some of those funds could have been generated by Horizon itself, or by errors made by the Post Office’s own staff, or by those of Fujitsu. They weren't "real" losses at all. They were phantom discrepancies."
You can read their final report here...
https://www.scribd.com/doc/262552400/Second-Sight-final-report-into-Horizon
Not that long, but highly critical of P.O. I have just read a tweet from RW saying “...we were fired immediately after we demanded access to the PO Suspense Account records.”
You can also watch the BES Select Committee hearings back in February 2015 - just my opinion but the PO team got absolutely skewered - link below.
https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/business-innovation-and-skills/news/post-office-mediation-scheme-ev-session/
Many observers of this lengthy case, thought it was all over when the mediation settlement was agreed last week. It now looks very much like that point marked the start of a whole new chapter, but this time the PO is going to have an awful lot of questions to answer.