Sub-Postmasters were abused by a business that came under the oversight of elected MP’s acting as Ministers.
Ministers who now say they had no idea what was going on because various individuals within the company had decided to withhold the truth from them and gaslight the everyone else.
It’s taken over two decades, multiple ruined lives, losses of livelihoods, loss of freedom and 6 suicides for the Post Office to admit that they had accused and prosecuted people while knowingly lying about everything.
And the only reason that this endemic problem exists is because investigations of corporate criminality can be covered up with more lies because white collar criminals are protected by a system that treats lying as essential and prefers the appearance of malfeasance to any truth.
The individuals involved in the cover up were not just withholding documents, they were covering up the knowledge that they had abused and prosecuted innocent employees.
The Post Office had always known that their software wasn’t fit for purpose and that they knew that Fujitsu had been fixing it in a live environment that could secretly alter figures and exploit backdoor access to Post Office accounts - and now we know that Fujitsu were awarded £billions in contracts to supply software to the MOD and Home Office after this problem came to light ... so we’ll be looking forward to seeing Fujitsu offer to pay the sub-post masters compensation to keep the politicians who failed to act in their jobs.
It has to be remembered that all software has bugs and no software is written to be perfect out of the box - but the Post Office wanted to hide the fact that their software was rolled out and was being tested in a live environment because it was shite and was in the dramatisation open to random or malicious abuse by Fujitsu staff.
But why the Post Office bureaucrats are in trouble is that while knowing that there were hundreds of problems with Horizon, they needlessly threatened sub post masters with bankruptcy and closed businesses on the basis of powers they derived from what appears to be an illegal contract - which they cites to corruptly prosecute their own employees for criminal acts that they had no actual evidence for.
DEFRA’s abuse of our entire sector came despite knowing that their regulations were not fit for purpose.
- DEFRA allowed this to happen for cycle after cycle despite the oversight of elected MPs who held a Ministerial cabinet position, because they were not told what was going on.
- So, either the DEFRA minister was getting off on overseeing the destruction of another sector that DEFRA were responsible for or individual bureaucrats withheld the information, their incompetence and their cock-ups from the cabinet Ministers to save themselves.
This discussion of the Post Office fiasco and the DEFRA debacle is covered in ten short articles:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5,
Part 6,
Part 7,
Part 8,
Part 9,
Part 10