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Largest ever miscarriage of justice?

Filippo Lippi said:
Everybody on a board in Britain is thick
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To a certain extent I have to agree (and I've been on a couple of boards...) most of the time intelligence isn't what is being selected for - playing corporate politics is. And for chairs, especially non-execs it's usually either their connections or an appearance of maturity and stability or both and a reputation not to interfere.
 
Darat said:
To a certain extent I have to agree (and I've been on a couple of boards...) most of the time intelligence isn't what is being selected for - playing corporate politics is. And for chairs, especially non-execs it's usually either their connections or an appearance of maturity and stability or both and a reputation not to interfere.
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I have to be careful what I say on a public forum but I can remember, some thirty years ago, presenting to the board plus hangers-on of a big company on the brink of going bust and realising that no-one in that room apart from us grey-suited auditors was capable of reading a set of financial statements. About fifteen wretched incompetents. We... made this clear in our statutory reporting.

ETA: they went bust, we got sued, we won.
 
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Vennells is not as stupid as she tries to portray herself as. She studied French, Russian and Economics at degree level. The nonsense about her being unable to think of an alternative word for 'bug' or 'defect' and had to ask her clever husband is just a massive act to hide her Master Bully personna.
 
Vixen said:
Vennells is not as stupid as she tries to portray herself as. She studied French, Russian and Economics at degree level. The nonsense about her being unable to think of an alternative word for 'bug' or 'defect' and had to ask her clever husband is just a massive act to hide her Master Bully personna.
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So talking and rote and pseudoscience - can't see why she'd have to be particularly clever to have a degree in those subjects.
 
Darat said:
So talking and rote and pseudoscience - can't see why she'd have to be particularly clever to have a degree in those subjects.
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She's hardly the ditzy innocent airhead that she portrays herself to be. By claiming it was someone else's idea to change the words from 'bug' and 'defect' and that she knew absolutely nothing at all because nobody told her nuffink, she is masking her true status as someone who gets others to do their bullying for them whilst giving the appearance of being some toothy Pollyanna figure in a dog collar. At the inquiry she was ready to burst into tears because of that horrid KC asking questions, whilst at the same time she had a heart of stone when a 'subbie' topped himself in front of a bus.

Learning languages takes a certain grasp of logic, listening skills and a reasonable vocabulary. It is not 'rote learning' at degree level. You have to be able to comprehend complex literature in its original language. I mean, the other words for 'bugs' and 'defects' she got her husband to suggest to her: 'exceptions' and 'unforeseen anomalies' must surely be somewhere in her various dictionaries or even just a quick google for synonyms.

Economics will have given her an idea of swings and roundabouts; demand and supply, market forces, every action having a counter action, for example interest rates chasing exchange rates. The subpost offices being heavily cash rich owing to the fact that until recently, at least, pensioners and benefit collectors queued up for their money in cash. These days it goes straight to their bank, but nonetheless, at regular intervals, sub post offices needed to be delivered of large sums of cash in order to carry out business. All of which has to be accounted for. If there was a glitch in the Horizon system which meant every cash output to a customer had to have a corresponding receipt or voucher, then it becomes apparent that if the system is inadvertently duplicating some entries unbeknownst to the 'subbie' then it is not going to balance at the end of the day. Being told that this did happen and that Fujtisu staff could remotely access the system to presumably adjust it but without any audit trail, then clearly controls were not as they should be. Staff were digging into their own savings to make up the supposed differences thrown out by the system. So if there was a duplicate entry then they had to dream up a counter entry for the books to balance and then Catch-22 they would be done for 'false accounting' when the auditors arrive and fail to find the corresponding paperwork. How Vennells can claim there is no way she could figure out that this caused enormous stress to the 'subbies' in trying to balance their records - and convictions increased manifold from the pre-Horizon era - and that nobody told her, especially when Critchton the corporate lawyer gave her the Second Sight report into the failings of the system, it is just simply not plausible that she is Little Miss Innocent. And where was the audit trail whereby 'subbies' could follow what had happened? There was none so that should have been a red flag for a start.

Rather than listen to the 'subbies' concerns, Vennells decided she was going to fight them tooth and nail instead and got her lackies to put our false claims that the system was robust and then fighting them in the courts. That is not how a nice person behaves. Yet that is how she wants to be perceived. The dog collar is probably part of her disguise.
 
Intelligent people make mistakes and do stupid things. The culture at the PO, and in management in general, is that it is clever to protect the brand and see off attacks. There was no, or a limited, duty of candour. Hopefully we are seeing that type of culture unravelling. The new intelligence will be to be more open to criticism and where errors are found, they are corrected. There will be a strong duty of candour.
 
Nessie said:
Intelligent people make mistakes and do stupid things. The culture at the PO, and in management in general, is that it is clever to protect the brand and see off attacks. There was no, or a limited, duty of candour. Hopefully we are seeing that type of culture unravelling. The new intelligence will be to be more open to criticism and where errors are found, they are corrected. There will be a strong duty of candour.
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I am not sure Vennells saw herself as 'protecting the brand' although she was rewarded for her performance. In my experience, firing off a sniffy letter to a CEO of a bank, service provider or manufacturer of goods, threatening to bring in an ombudsman, 100% resulted in prompt rectification of the complaint as a matter of alacrity. Most CEO's do care about the public perception of their company or brand. The last thing they want is a bad reputation or people contacting them directly. Vennells OTOH seems to have revelled in being in fisticuffs with the 'subbies' as she referred to them. Of course, it didn't help that the 'subbies' own union was largely unsupportive, too. Being in a union doesn't necessarily mean the little guy can fight the big guy. The lesson here is that the Post Office Ltd was completely unbalanced with no means of redress for anyone with a complaint or grievance.
 
From The Times:

“Lawyers acting for the sub-postmasters have highlighted that in some cases judges refused repeated applications from the defence for disclosure of *evidence about the reliability of the *Horizon system.

Speaking at the conference, Flora Page, a barrister who has represented a number of sub-postmasters, said that in some cases judges had “for sure” failed the defendants.

Page described the case of one woman as “an absolute shocker from start to finish — every *aspect of the system let her down”.

The barrister described the process as “a show trial” that involved “the Post Office and Fujitsu [the company that developed the accounting software] *using the trial to justify the Horizon system. And the judge, unfortunately, fell for it.””


https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/postmasters-failed-by-judges-horizon-it-scandal-x0gwc6kh9
 
Orphia Nay said:
That seems impenetrable to me, sorry, can someone give a summary and some background?
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The best I can make out is that because the Judge had previously ruled against the Post Office, PO lawyers argued he was biased. That is like a Judge who has previously found a criminal guilty not being allowed to be involved in any future trial, because he is now supposedly biased against the accused. In reality, Judges can often see the same person in the dock on dozens of occasions.

What this was, was the PO trying to make the action by the sub-postmasters even more expensive, by delaying and/or getting a new action in front of a new Judge. It is an example of public organisations with unlimited funds forcing a win by being able to outspend complainants. That is what a proposed Hillsborough Law would stop, whereby equal funding would go to the complainants.
 
Nessie said:
The best I can make out is that because the Judge had previously ruled against the Post Office, PO lawyers argued he was biased. That is like a Judge who has previously found a criminal guilty not being allowed to be involved in any future trial, because he is now supposedly biased against the accused. In reality, Judges can often see the same person in the dock on dozens of occasions.

What this was, was the PO trying to make the action by the sub-postmasters even more expensive, by delaying and/or getting a new action in front of a new Judge. It is an example of public organisations with unlimited funds forcing a win by being able to outspend complainants. That is what a proposed Hillsborough Law would stop, whereby equal funding would go to the complainants.
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Thank you so much.
 
Nessie said:
The best I can make out is that because the Judge had previously ruled against the Post Office, PO lawyers argued he was biased. That is like a Judge who has previously found a criminal guilty not being allowed to be involved in any future trial, because he is now supposedly biased against the accused. In reality, Judges can often see the same person in the dock on dozens of occasions.

What this was, was the PO trying to make the action by the sub-postmasters even more expensive, by delaying and/or getting a new action in front of a new Judge. It is an example of public organisations with unlimited funds forcing a win by being able to outspend complainants. That is what a proposed Hillsborough Law would stop, whereby equal funding would go to the complainants.
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:offtopic

For the uninitiated, the name and concept for the Hillsborough Law came about in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster, a tragic occurrence in which about a hundred football fans died, and about 750 were injured in a crowd crush at a match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, on 15 April 1989.
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smartcooky said:
:offtopic

For the uninitiated, the name and concept for the Hillsborough Law came about in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster, a tragic occurrence in which about a hundred football fans died, and about 750 were injured in a crowd crush at a match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, on 15 April 1989.
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The Post Office scandal is another example of why such a law is needed.

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/post-office-legal-strategy-force-the-claimants-to-burn-money/

"Post Office legal strategy: “force the claimants to burn money”

Dirty legal tactic that needs to be prevented, as it flies in the face of justice and is in effect legalised extortion.

"...Andy Parsons, a Womble Bond Dickinson lawyer tasked with co-ordinated the Post Office’s defence of Bates v Post Office told his colleagues on 1 Nov 2018 (the eve of the first trial): “my instinct is that the claimants’ funding is under pressure and they do not want to be burning money on a third trial”.
His suggestion therefore was to try to “force the claimants to burn money” but do so in a way which achieves the Post Office’s objectives “whilst trying not to look tactical!”
 
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