This absolutely was a fraud. The (unfair) contract required postmasters to make good any shortfalls. The hundreds who were prosecuted either refused or ran out of their own money to make up the shortfalls. Many were sacked because they refused to sign the accounts, losing their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names as a result. Thousands more were just quietly putting their own money in, sometimes unfairly suspecting an employee of theft, due to errors the Post Office knew about but refused to admit.
And a primary driver of the scandal was the imperative to make the Post Office profitable so that it could be privatised, with investigators paid partly based on how much money they recovered. New Labour and the Coalition both have much of this blood on their hands.
Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names. I’m not a fan of carceral solutions and Noel Thomas, imprisoned for nine months before his conviction was overturned, says he would not wish it on anyone. He is right. But destitution is something these people visited on hundreds of people for their own financial gain and those gains need to come back to the people they harmed.
This is a useful Computer Weekly summary which links to all its pieces over the years: Post Office Horizon scandal explained: Everything you need to know
Gut-wrenchingly awful. The senior people responsible need to lose their livelihoods, pensions, life savings, homes and good names.
They also need to spend some time in jail.
I covered that. Regardless, a spell in jail won’t deprive them of their pensions or their homes (Jeffrey Epstein went to jail and came out just as rich and powerful as when he went in).
I want them to pay a real price. The same price they extracted from thousands of subpostmasters. And I want every other senior executive and politician to know that it is a price that can be extracted from them too.
I said “also” because they need to lose everything AND go to jail. You said that jail wouldn’t help.
Jail does not help. These are not the cases I would choose to test anti-carceral arguments on - and in the current carceral context, jail would be eminently reasonable. As long as they don’t come out to their massive pensions and massive houses and all the trappings of luxury they bought off the backs of the people who were powerless to stop them.
Well, epstein wasn’t really in jail since they let him out to go to work super frequently.
To be clear, Noel Thomas was only sentenced to 9 months and served it in full. He wasn’t exonerated until much later. Many convicted sub-postmasters died before their convictions could be overturned, and most of them are still waiting to get back the thousands they paid to pad the post office’s profits.
As if Toby Jones wasn’t enough of a national treasure, it’s his series “Mr Bates Vs The Post Office” that’s shining a light on this scandal again
Well worth a watch. You may not recognise his name but pretty much everything he’s done is fantastic
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON (AP) — U.K. police have opened a fraud investigation into Britain’s Post Office over a miscarriage of justice that saw hundreds of postmasters wrongfully accused of stealing money when a faulty computer system was to blame.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 700 post office branch managers were accused of theft or fraud because computers wrongly showed that money was missing.
The real culprit was a defective computer accounting system called Horizon, supplied by the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu, that was installed in local Post Office branches in 1999.
The Post Office maintained for years that data from Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty when the system showed money was missing.
Lee Castleton, a former branch manager who went bankrupt after being pursued by the Post Office for missing funds, said his family was ostracized in their hometown of Bridlington in northern England.
Post Office Chief Executive Nick Read, appointed after the scandal, welcomed the TV series and said he hoped it would “raise further awareness and encourage anyone affected who has not yet come forward to seek the redress and compensation they deserve.”
The original article contains 560 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I feel like this is important to call out.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 700 post office branch managers were accused of theft or fraud because computers wrongly showed that money was missing. Many were financially ruined after being forced to pay large sums to the company, and some were convicted and sent to prison. Several killed themselves.
