正在加载视频...

视频加载失败

#PostOfficeScandal #PostOfficeInquiry #StateScandal #MrBatesVsThePostOffice On 23rd September 2013 Martin Griffiths, 58, deliberately stepped in front of a bus and suffered fatal injuries after being “hounded” by Post Office over alleged shortfalls caused by the malfunctioning Horizon IT system. He was further being pursued by Post Office bosses over monies...

70,251 次观看 • 2 年前 •via X (Twitter)

0 条评论

暂无评论

原始帖子的评论将显示在这里

相关视频

MEET THE BARRISTER THE POST OFFICE FEARS Here's a name that deserves to trend more than half the people who actually do. Sam Stein KC. While the Post Office was busy ruining ordinary people's lives over money that was never actually missing, Stein was in a courtroom taking it apart piece by piece. He represents most of the subpostmasters at the Post Office Horizon Inquiry Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, instructed by Howe and Co Howe + Co Solicitors, on behalf of the people the Post Office tried to bury. In 2021 he stood in the Court of Appeal representing a group of subpostmasters, instructed by Howe and Co Howe + Co Solicitors, in the same case that finally cleared Jo Hamilton Jo Hamilton and dozens of others after years of wrongful convictions. He told the judges the Post Office's refusal to investigate its own broken Horizon system, built by Fujitsu Fujitsu UK, was the longest running affront to British justice in living memory. The judges agreed and quashed the convictions. Then the public inquiry started and Stein really got going. He told the inquiry the Post Office had turned itself into "the nation's most untrustworthy brand." A blunt summary, backed by 2.2 million pages of evidence. He described former Post Office lawyer Mandy Talbot as "the Post Office's very own evil robot" after she was asked repeatedly who had directed a legal strategy built to silence a subpostmaster and kept saying she couldn't remember. Convenient amnesia. Goes around a lot in this organisation. He summed up a whole phase of hearings by calling the parade of witnesses "a rogues' gallery." Executives who forgot everything except how to protect themselves. Questioning executive Angela van den Bogerd about the Post Office's own helpline, he told her she had been "intimidating and bullying" toward subpostmistress Jennifer O'Dell, who kept calling to say she hadn't stolen a penny. She was telling the truth. Nobody listened for years. In his closing submission for phase 2, he told the inquiry to work out whether the entire scandal was a "cock-up or cook-up." By phase 3 he had his answer. Cook-up, no doubt about it. He said the Post Office spent that entire phase dodging its own failures and instead "turned its tank turret gun on Fujitsu." Subpostmasters called the organisation that prosecuted them "the abuser." Questioning former minister Pat McFadden about it, Stein got that word onto the official record, permanently. In his final closing statement, Stein made the point that mattered most. This was never really a problem with a computer. It was a problem with people, and people paid the price. He said what actually drove the scandal was "cruelty, callousness and connivance," and that people are still living with the consequences. He also named former CEO Paula Vennells, executive Angela van den Bogerd and in-house lawyer Jarnail Singh as part of a rogues' gallery remembered for lies and incompetence, and pointed out £37 million received by the Post Office is still unaccounted for. Nobody's chasing it. Urgency always disappears when it's the institution's own money at stake. He also said the external law firm Cartwright King failed subpostmasters, because by the time its lawyers were brought in, they had become company men. Stein also pushed the inquiry to recommend actual restorative justice. Counselling for postmasters and their families. Bursaries for children whose education was wrecked. A permanent memorial. Reputations rebuilt in the small communities where they were destroyed. Volume 1 of the final report landed in July 2025. The rest keeps slipping. Current estimate is September 2026, and even that looks optimistic. A criminal investigation into the Post Office is on hold waiting for it. People keep dying while they wait to be believed. The Post Office spent two decades hoping this would quietly disappear. Sam Stein KC made sure it never got the chance. SOURCES ComputerWeekly Law Society Gazette BBC News (UK) and many others.

Artur Nadolny

41,185 次观看 • 1 个月前

THE POST OFFICE DESTROYED HUNDREDS OF LIVES. DID IT ALSO PUT AN INNOCENT MAN AWAY FOR MURDER? Paul Bourne from Linkedin brought this story to me this week. Paul, I owe you one for this. Robin Garbutt woke up on 23 March 2010 and went to open his Post Office like any other morning. By the end of that day, his wife Diana was dead. He was a suspect. Within a year, he was in prison for life. He has been there ever since. Robin says what happened that morning was this. An armed man broke in. Forced him at gunpoint to open the safe and hand over £16,000. Robin was powerless. He ran upstairs after the man left and found Diana bludgeoned to death in their bed. The police did not believe him. Prosecutors built a case around one central idea. Robin had been stealing from the Post Office. Diana found out. He killed her to keep her quiet and staged the robbery to cover his tracks. The theft evidence came from Horizon. The same IT system that fabricated shortfalls in hundreds of Post Office branches across the country. The same system that saw innocent sub-postmasters prosecuted, bankrupted, and driven to suicide. The system that the courts have since described as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Robin was never actually charged with theft. Not once. A former Fujitsu employee has since come forward and confirmed the Horizon data used at his trial had been compromised. The Post Office knew it. There was no DNA on the murder weapon. A clump of unidentified hair found at the scene was never tested. It disappeared. Police admitted that was a serious professional failure. The pathology evidence on the time of death has been challenged by independent experts. What the prosecution had was a theory. Built on a broken computer. Presented to a jury who had no reason to doubt the Post Office. Robin has appealed four times. The CCRC has said no four times. A Sky documentary aired Christmas 2025. Former sub-postmasters who were themselves destroyed by Horizon are now publicly demanding he gets a retrial. Lee Castleton OBE is one of them. Empowering the Innocent (ETI) and The Justice Gap @justicegap.bsky.social have both covered this case in depth. A new CCRC case manager has been appointed. Robin is 60 years old. He has been inside for 15 years. His family have spent 15 years fighting for him. His sister says he does not want early release. He wants to stand in court, face the evidence, and prove he is innocent. That is not what a guilty man asks for. The Post Office corrupted evidence. The prosecution used that evidence to convict a man of murder. The body that is supposed to correct miscarriages of justice has blocked him at every turn. If the system was this broken for hundreds of financial cases, what makes anyone confident it worked properly in this one?

Artur Nadolny

15,290 次观看 • 3 个月前

POST OFFICE KNEW ITS TILL BUTTON WAS ROBBING PEOPLE SINCE 2019 A subpostmaster called Denis O'Donnell messaged me on LinkedIn. He follows this page and asked me to help amplify a story he has spent six years trying to get anyone to take seriously. After checking it out I understand why he is still fighting. In 2019 O'Donnell ran a Post Office branch in Prestatyn, Wales. He noticed something wrong with the till. A screen icon on the Horizon system does two opposite jobs, take money and pay money. When several transactions stack up together, Horizon can hand cash to a customer and then log it as a payment the other way, creating an instant shortfall the subpostmaster gets blamed for. O'Donnell wrote to the top. He sent letters to then CEO Nick Read and communications boss Mark Davies. Post Office's answer was that it was a one off mistake, fixed within days. Convenient timing too, since this was 6 months after Post Office had just been humiliated in the High Court by subpostmasters who proved Horizon was faulty all along. O'Donnell kept pushing for years. He eventually got the story to ComputerWeekly and its reporter Karl Flinders Karl Flinders, and to Ron Warmington, the forensic investigator at Second Sight who was one of the original people who blew open the whole Horizon scandal back in 2012. Warmington called this new defect sufficiently serious to write directly to the public inquiry. He also called Post Office's first response to questions about it arrogant and dismissive, which by now is basically the company's official slogan. Post Office finally agreed to investigate and warn branches in December 2025. Six years after O'Donnell first told them. Their own spokesperson said it is impossible to know the true impact but they believe it is limited, based on checking 1 year of error logs out of more than 24 years Horizon has been running. O'Donnell calls that maths a joke, and it is hard to disagree when millions of transactions across two and a half decades got reduced to a single year sample. O'Donnell is trying to warn other subpostmasters and their families that the Post Office Process Review scheme closes to new applications on 30 September 2026. This scheme covers losses caused by Post Office products, policies or processes, separate from the Horizon Shortfall Scheme which already closed in January and the GLO scheme closing this month. If people affected by this specific defect do not apply before the deadline, they may lose the chance entirely. Post Office spent over two decades telling subpostmasters the system never lies. Then it spent six more years telling one particular whistleblower his bug did not matter. Forgive people for not trusting the next apology on the first read. If you are a current or former subpostmaster affected by this or unsure about the Process Review deadline, get proper advice before it closes. SOURCES ComputerWeekly Karl Flinders Post Office Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry BBC News (UK)

Artur Nadolny

47,605 次观看 • 2 个月前

#PostOfficeScandal Tonight on Channel 4 News with Jackie Long there was an exclusive report by alex thomson & Nanette van der Laan that revealed for the first time a secret contract between Post Office and Fujitsu UK For years, the Post Office and Fujitsu covered up the bugs in their faulty Horizon computer software, blaming the subpostmasters using it. Thousands had their lives ruined. Some took their own lives. Now Channel 4 News has obtained a 2006 contract between the two companies – overlooked despite being uploaded to the Post Office Inquiry’s website – which a forensic accountant who investigated the Horizon scandal has described as “dynamite”. Featuring Tracy Felstead Lee Castleton OBE Ron Warmington Liam Byrne MP The fact Post Office denied remote access was possible until days before the High Court 2nd trial in 2019 when there was a contract that was signed in 2006, shows just how far they were prepared to go to keep this document out of the public domain. For it to come to light almost 20 years after it was first signed is a disgrace. It was not disclosed to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry so that witnesses could be cross examined on it. Now it will be up to Business and Trade Committee and its Chair Liam Byrne MP to uncover who knew what and when, why it wasn’t disclosed and when Fujitsu are going to start contributing to the colossal financial redress bill estimated to be £1.6 billion. At the moment it is all being carried by the taxpayer.

Christopher Head OBE

11,506 次观看 • 9 个月前

THE GRAVE CLEANER Julian Wilson ran the post office in Astwood Bank, Worcestershire, with his wife Karen from 2001 to 2008. He bought the business for £125,000. He kept meticulous records and reported every glitch the moment he spotted it. That kind of diligence usually gets you a pat on the back. Here it got him a criminal record. Post Office's Horizon system, showed a shortfall of over £27,000 that never actually existed. His lawyer told him plead guilty or risk prison. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to false accounting. His sentence was 300 hours of community service. Part of that service was cleaning graves. A man who rang the Horizon helpdesk to report a fault ended up scrubbing headstones as punishment for a bug he didn't create. The Post Office slapped the couple with a confiscation order and froze their assets. They were forced to sell the business at a fraction of what it was worth. Karen sold her jewellery, including her engagement ring, to help cover the costs. Julian could never get another job with a false accounting conviction hanging over him. He spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name and became one of the founding members of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. He never got to see it succeed. Julian died of bowel cancer in 2016. His conviction was finally quashed in 2021, 5 years after he was already gone. Karen Wilson told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry that the investigation and his illness broke him in the end. Paula Vennells ran the Post Office from 2012 to 2019 while it kept insisting the software was fine. She has since said she is truly sorry for the devastation caused. An apology does not clean a grave. It does not un-convict a dead man either. More than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 in what is now formally recognised as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Julian Wilson is one name inside that number. He deserved to hear the word innocent while he was still alive to hear it. SOURCES BBC News (UK) Nick Wallis Karl Flinders Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Post Office Fujitsu UK

Artur Nadolny

19,708 次观看 • 1 个月前

BULLY BOYS IN BLACK SUITS Chris Dawson ran a thriving Post Office branch in Pitlochry, Perthshire, plus a smaller one in Kinloch Rannoch and an attached toy and gift shop. Then in 2010 an auditor turned up, the Horizon system flagged a £17,500 shortfall, and his life ended that day even though nobody told him yet. Two men in black suits interrogated him in his own home while his wife and kids sat upstairs. He called them bully boys. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry heard how there was an automatic presumption of guilt before a single fact was checked. He was offered a deal. Plead guilty to theft and they would drop the fraud charge. He said no, because he had not stolen anything, because nobody had. He was suspended for six months on no pay. Within months the mortgage was gone. Within months the marriage was gone too. He said he does not believe any marriage could survive that kind of pressure, and he is right, because marriages are not built to survive being audited by a computer glitch. He was never prosecuted. That is meant to sound like good news. It is not. He still lost the business, the home, the car, and was declared bankrupt. Pitlochry is a small cash handling town and everyone knew he was under suspicion. He said it made him unemployable. Nobody hires the guy the town thinks robbed the Post Office, even when the Post Office quietly knew the £17,500 was never actually missing. He ended up washing dishes to survive. He battled depression through what he calls 14 years of hell on earth. He rebuilt his life from nothing, working as a carer for vulnerable elderly people, the very people who never got the memo that dignity is optional once an algorithm decides you are a thief. In 2022 he gave evidence in Glasgow and wept in front of the inquiry. He asked to see former chief executive Paula Vennells and other senior officials face the full weight of the law, the same weight that was so eagerly dropped on him for a crime that never happened. He was 48 years old when he said it. He should never have had to. Another subpostmaster, another stolen decade, another institution that never once said sorry until a TV drama forced the country to look. SOURCES BBC Scotland News STV News The Courier Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Artur Nadolny

30,635 次观看 • 1 个月前

POST OFFICE BANKRUPTED A MAN FOR ASKING FOR HELP 91 TIMES Lee Castleton spent 9 years in the RAF, then worked as a stockbroker in the City. In 2003 he and his wife decided they wanted a slower life for their two young kids. They sold their home and bought a small Post Office branch in Bridlington, on the seafront. Within a year the dream job turned into a nightmare. His accounts started showing losses that made no sense. So he did the responsible thing and called the Horizon helpline. Then he called it again. And again. 91 times in 12 weeks, begging someone to explain where the money was going. Nobody could tell him. The Post Office's answer to being told 91 times that their own system was broken was to audit him, suspend him, and demand he pay back 25,000 pounds he never touched. Castleton had no money left for a lawyer so he represented himself in the High Court, alone, against an organisation with a government sized legal budget. He lost. The Post Office then chased him for 321,000 pounds in legal costs and bankrupted him. That is the reward for reporting a fault 91 times. Bankruptcy. The fallout went well beyond the shop. His kids were bullied at school. His daughter was spat at because people in town assumed her dad was a thief. His wife's health suffered under the strain. All because a computer system got the maths wrong and nobody at the top wanted to admit it. In 2019 Castleton was one of over 550 former postmasters who won a group settlement of 58 million pounds. He personally received 20,000 pounds, a rounding error next to what the case cost him. He was even locked out of a mediation scheme the Post Office ran for people who believed they had been wrongly pursued. Years later former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells told the Horizon IT Inquiry under oath that Castleton's treatment was unforgivable. She also said she had likely signed off on the 300,000 pound bill that ruined him. Unforgivable is one word for it. There are others. Castleton is now suing the Post Office and Fujitsu UK for up to 8 million pounds, arguing the original 2007 judgment against him was obtained by fraud. In May 2026 the Court of Appeal ruled his case should be heard as one trial instead of being split into pieces designed to bury it in cost and delay. A small win. Nearly two decades late. He wanted a quieter life running a post office by the sea. Instead he became one of the clearest examples of what happens when an institution would rather bankrupt an innocent man than admit its software was broken. Sources BBC News (UK) Law Society Gazette ComputerWeekly and others

Artur Nadolny

569,809 次观看 • 1 个月前

PARMOD KALIA IS DEAD He died on 13 March 2026, aged 67, still waiting for the full compensation he was owed. Owed for a crime he never committed. Parmod Kalia ran a Post Office branch in Orpington for 11 years. Clean record, steady business, nothing unusual. Then Horizon showed up and decided he owed £22,000 he never took. He was accused of theft in 2001. Investigators got a confession out of him. He said later it was signed in fear, not guilt. He pleaded guilty because that is what people do when the system makes resistance cost more than surrender. He got 6 months in prison. It took until 2021 for Southwark Crown Court to quash the conviction. Post Office didn't even oppose the appeal. Twenty years to undo what one honest look at the evidence should have caught in a week. Through all of it Kalia worked as a foster carer, giving stability to vulnerable children while carrying a criminal record he was too ashamed to mention to the people closest to him. His friend Tim Brentnall said he brought calmness and warmth to whatever room he walked into. Funny how the system managed the opposite for him. Then came the cancer diagnosis. He told ITV News he was taking it one day at a time, hoping his final redress payment might arrive before he ran out of days. It didn't arrive in time. He was one of more than 4,300 subpostmasters still waiting on full and final compensation when he died. Post Office said if there had been retrials there was still a reasonable prospect of conviction, so Kalia wasn't owed full compensation for malicious prosecution. Read that twice. A wrongly convicted, terminally ill man was told the theoretical odds still weren't fully in his favour, so the payment could wait. Meanwhile MPs pointed out that Fujitsu Fujitsu UK still hasn't contributed a single penny to the nearly £1.5 billion redress bill for a scandal it built and sold to the Post Office. Not one penny. They can engineer software that jails hundreds of innocent people but apparently a bank transfer is beyond their technical capability. More than 700 branch managers were convicted between 1999 and 2015 because of Horizon's fictional shortfalls. Only a fraction have full settlements. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry keeps recording the names of people who died waiting. Kalia is just the latest entry on a list that should never have existed. He wasn't asking for a favour. He was asking for what he was owed, for a crime he never committed, from a system that has known it was broken for over a decade. SOURCES BBC News (UK) ITV News ComputerWeekly Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Artur Nadolny

85,133 次观看 • 1 个月前

POST OFFICE PUT A CHILD IN PRISON In 2002 Tracy Felstead Tracy Felstead was a 19 year old counter clerk. She worked at the Camberwell Green Post Office branch in south London. She had left school and was proud to have a job with a company everyone trusted. Then the Post Office's Horizon computer system showed a shortfall of £11,503 at her till. Nobody checked if the machine was wrong. Post Office investigators decided Tracy was a thief. She was interviewed under caution at Peckham police station. Investigators asked her to prove she did not steal money that a computer had simply invented. They even asked if her own family had pressured her to steal. Her family scraped together the £11,500 and paid it back. They were told this could help her avoid prison. It did not work. Tracy was convicted of theft and false accounting at trial. The judge sent her to a young offender institution for 6 months. She was still a teenager. Inside, she saw things no 19 year old should see. She has said the memory of prison still comes back to her now, decades later. She has spoken about trying to take her own life twice because of what happened to her. Years later the stress caught up with her body too. She suffered a neurological breakdown that left her temporarily paralysed on one side. Tracy was not alone. Horizon was built and run by Fujitsu Fujitsu UK. Between 2000 and 2014 the Post Office prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters and counter staff using data from that same system. It is now officially called the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Paula Vennells Paula Vennells ran the Post Office as chief executive from 2012 to 2019. Under her watch the organisation spent millions fighting the very people it had wrongly accused, rather than admitting the software was broken. Over 1 million people later signed a petition demanding she hand back her CBE. The Court of Appeal finally quashed Tracy's conviction in 2021. 19 years after she went to prison. Nobody at the Post Office or Fujitsu spent a single night in a cell for it. In 2023 Tracy sat down with Post Office bosses in Parliament, with the support of her then MP Lucy Allan Lucy Allan. She told the chief executive to his face how to fix the compensation process. She later gave evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, about what six months in a cell at 19 actually cost her. A faulty computer got 16 years of trust from an entire national institution. A teenage counter clerk got a criminal record, a prison sentence, and a mental health battle that has lasted her whole adult life. Same script every time. Protect the system first. Apologise decades later, if at all.. SOURCES: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry BBC News (UK) The Guardian and many others.

Artur Nadolny

14,352 次观看 • 1 个月前

Janine Powell ran a Post Office branch in Tiverton, Devon. In 2007 Post Office bosses accused her of stealing £74,000. Their own courts later found the Post Office knew its Horizon system had bugs from the earliest days of its operation. They prosecuted her anyway. Post Office lawyers offered her a deal, plead guilty to false accounting and they would drop the theft charge. She said no, she wasn't pleading guilty to something she hadn't done. So they took her to trial in Exeter in 2008 and got their conviction. The judge gave her 18 months. She walked into prison two days after her daughter's 10th birthday. She served five months behind bars, then three more wearing an electronic tag. She left three children behind, aged 10 to 18, in the care of friends because their mother was in a cell instead of at home. She came out with a criminal record that made her unemployable, a hometown she felt too ashamed to walk through, and depression that pushed her toward suicide. This was never a rogue glitch nobody noticed. The Court of Appeal later ruled the Post Office "consistently asserted that Horizon was robust and reliable" and "steamrolled over" any subpostmaster who challenged it, calling the prosecutions an affront to the conscience of the court. Post Office lawyers hid evidence of Horizon's faults from courts, prosecutors and defence teams, to protect the organisation at all costs. Powell's conviction was quashed in 2022, one of hundreds overturned in what is now Britain's widest miscarriage of justice. More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 by an organisation that knew its own evidence was rotten and used it anyway. Janine Powell has given evidence to the ongoing public inquiry. More than 45 people connected to the scandal are now under criminal investigation. Still, nobody who signed off on her prosecution has spent a night in the cell they sent her to. SOURCES BBC News (UK) ITV News Nick Wallis

Artur Nadolny

133,609 次观看 • 1 个月前

DEAD BEFORE SHE WAS CLEARED Caren Lorimer ran the New Farm Loch Post Office in Kilmarnock for 17 years. In 2008 an "audit" claimed a £38,000 shortfall. She pled guilty to embezzlement so she would not go to prison. She was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and ordered to pay Post Office £15,000. That money was never missing because of her. It was Horizon, the accounting software Fujitsu Fujitsu UK built and Post Office Post Office used to prosecute more of its own staff than any other British organisation in history. Post Office knew the system threw up fake shortfalls for years and let people like Caren carry the blame anyway. Caren died from cancer in April 2022. She died a convicted criminal. Her husband David Lorimer, her daughter Laura Miller, her son Jack Lorimer and her niece Joanne Hughes kept fighting after she was gone. On 10 June 2024 the email came. Her conviction was quashed. She is the seventh person in Scotland cleared this way. In Scotland the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service COPFS COPFS prosecuted every Horizon case, unlike England where Post Office prosecuted directly. COPFS knew in 2013 there were problems with Horizon. It quietly stopped prosecuting new cases in 2015. It never went back and reviewed the convictions it had already secured, including Caren's. COPFS says it acted in good faith and was assured a review would not turn up miscarriages of justice. Convenient assurance. It let a woman die still labelled a thief while the people who ran her prosecution sat on the knowledge that the evidence was rotten. Post Office Post Office is 100% state owned. The government that owns it does not get to hide behind it and shrug. This is a public body running on public money, and public money comes with public accountability, something everyone involved here conveniently forgot. Caren's daughter Laura Miller said her mother knew all along she had done nothing wrong. So did the whole family. Now there is proof. It came two years too late for Caren to hear it herself. Comment below if this makes you as angry as it makes me. SOURCES BBC Scotland News, Katie Hunter, STV News and others.

Artur Nadolny

27,660 次观看 • 12 天前