Mr Bates Vs The Post Office

Kittyfrisk

Not to mention lying when giving evidence as a witness to a parliamentary committee, conspiring to withhold the disclosure of material facts relating to the sale of a business & that's just some stuff that we know about...

Benm39

Kittyfrisk said:

Not to mention lying when giving evidence as a witness to a parliamentary committee, conspiring to withhold the disclosure of material facts relating to the sale of a business & that's just some stuff that we know about...

Yup, the withholding of information from the sale prospectus is probably the issue most likely to lead to prosecuting... bit like Capone and income tax... still,  I'm not fussy,  I just think she and the others need some hefty prison time,  preferably in some rotting overcrowded victorian hellhole ( of which we appear to have plenty) where she'll really have cause to cry. 

sev112

Incompetence and inappropriateness in managing a national massive company for the benefit and operation of the country,   That is Issue 1.  That in itself isn’t great, and the overseers and appointees of her have to take some blame and impact of that, irrespective of what they said and were “told” - they were ministers protecting the country and its assets.

Incorrectly and I sufficiently managing a contemporary issue in one such organisation, such that it causes the country substantial commercial liabilities far in excess of what was being apparently “lost”

unfortunately I am not sure of any legal or employement law which can subsequently punish, prosecute , or even seek compensation for ? Even asking for her to pay back salary etc.  I don’t see how.
The only thing I can imagine is individual (or class) Tort prosecutions against her?  And I can’t on a s7nday morning work out where that has been done before and whether it could be afforded by the individuals/group and whether it world succeed?

then the legal and perjury aspects under her watch.  This is more more more more appalling than the text before, The destruction of peoples lives, STILL.  However I still am uncertain how the6 would be able to (after in Inquiry) successfully prosecute her individually for punishment /fines/imprisonment - it just occurs to me there are too many hands involve tip in stuff on her specifically.  What about therefore a Corporate Manslaughter prosecution but her being the CEO receiving the punishment for the suicide caused by this? Is that too lateral?

One other thing, I am guessing it is what the news selects, but the clips I see of the KC questions and her crying are the ones they want on the news programmes.  But throwing aggressive/argumentative statements at the witness, and then saying”what do you say to that?” seems poor/wrong to me other than “good TV”.  It is a national legal Inquiry, to my mind they should be asking factual questions “what happened there / what did they say / who advised that / what notes were taken” etc .   Maybe they are there (and I should have watched all the cross-examination like I did for Grenfell)  but the Tv doesn’t show them in the shirt clips.

Haych

For what my thoughts are worth; the government rushed in legislation to acquit and exonerate sub-postmasters/postmistresses and overturn convictions. Rightly so. 

Could they not introduce some sort of new corporate negligence law for the express purposes of bringing to account those execs at the helm while all this was happening?

TTony

sev112 said:

But throwing aggressive/argumentative statements at the witness, and then saying”what do you say to that?” seems poor/wrong to me other than “good TV”.  It is a national legal Inquiry, to my mind they should be asking factual questions “what happened there / what did they say / who advised that / what notes were taken” etc .  

As you say, the "good TV" bits were just a few seconds extracted from the many hours of questioning that actually took place.

The vast majority - ie the days and days of questioning other than those few "good TV" seconds - was a forensic examination of who did what, said/wrote what, and therefore could be shown to have known what, at specific times/meetings/events throughout the sad history.

All of that detailed factual examination was also broadcast, live, on national TV, for anyone who had the time or inclination to watch it (as I did), but doesn't really lend itself to "good TV" soundbites.

Gassage

sev112

Can we look at the LinkedIn summaries of all these people before it all blew up where they presumably tell the world how brilliant an executive they were at the Post Office and tout for sale all their corporate knowledge for the benefit of their next employers, all of which they can remember …?

TTony

sev112 said:

Can we look at the LinkedIn summaries of all these people

I posted van den Bogerd's when she was being questioned ...

TTony said:

Angela van den Bogerd;

"Accomplished HR senior leader with experience gained across the people function within a large, complex, unionised, regulated, multi site, UK organisation"

Reverend

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd110nl7dppo

Wow. 

Woodandwires

Just watching todays part of the inquiry,  the forensic investigator Kay Linnell is shoving it to the Post Office, doing a great job of highlighting the lies.

Offset

Reverend said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd110nl7dppo

Wow. 

Good grief.  Just as you thought the PO couldn't sink any lower or be more incompetent...

Lost for words.

Gassage

Had a little heads up from my pal today to watch George Thomson (NFPM Gen Sec) evidence.

He was right- absolute car crash stuff- Julian Blake is slowing dismantling him to the point of evisceration.

Blake has the patience of Job.

Reverend

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cmjjjg8drggt today, Fujitsu's man say there were no problems...

TTony

Reverend said:

Fujitsu's man say there were no problems...

That's not really what he's saying - at least not in the hour or so that I just watched.

I thought he was a pretty typical techie - deep but narrow knowledge - and naïve to some of the wider implications, possibly also naïve to his previous expert witness statements.  In some of the Qs that he answered, he was clearly answering the question he understood rather than the implications of the question that was being asked.

Also, either he's much better at underplaying his actual role than many of the previous witnesses, or his role was not as sole-point-of-accountability-for-Fujitsu as has been portrayed for him. 

Unless his Fujitsu job description included the words "goat" and "scape" somewhere ...

Gassage

TTony said:

Reverend said:

Fujitsu's man say there were no problems...

That's not really what he's saying - at least not in the hour or so that I just watched.

I thought he was a pretty typical techie - deep but narrow knowledge - and naïve to some of the wider implications, possibly also naïve to his previous expert witness statements.  In some of the Qs that he answered, he was clearly answering the question he understood rather than the implications of the question that was being asked.

Also, either he's much better at underplaying his actual role than many of the previous witnesses, or his role was not as sole-point-of-accountability-for-Fujitsu as has been portrayed for him. 

Unless his Fujitsu job description included the words "goat" and "scape" somewhere ...

Absolutely. Also, his challenge of the judgement is from a techhie POV, not a legal one. He sees coding, SQL...not the Fraud Act 2006.

GuyBoden

Does he fully appreciate that based on his Expert Witness Statements Sub-Post Masters were prosecuted. "Duties of Disclosure"

GuyBoden

Live here:

Gassage

GuyBoden said:

Does he fully appreciate that based on his Expert Witness Statements Sub-Post Masters were prosecuted. "Duties of Disclosure"

I think Jason Beer is slowly demonstrating that GJ is not the issue.....he was used as a weapon- he wasn't the person firing.

GuyBoden

Gassage said:

GuyBoden said:

Does he fully appreciate that based on his Expert Witness Statements Sub-Post Masters were prosecuted. "Duties of Disclosure"

I think Jason Beer is slowly demonstrating that GJ is not the issue.....he was used as a weapon- he wasn't the person firing.

It seems that GJ is trying to bluff that he didn't know what an Expert Witness was in legal terms.

Edit: GJ's Lunch Break.

TTony

To add a bit more, and perhaps argue against some of the BBC summary ...

A judge described the system as "not remotely robust".  Challenged on that by the KC, Jenkins disagreed with the judge's findings, saying that whilst there were some issues, the system was generally working well.

That gets summarised as "Jenkins disagreed with the judge's finding that Horizon wasn't robust".  So, let's hang Jenkins.

But I'd say that Jenkins' statement was the more accurate (and I'd maybe hang some of the reporters for inaccurate reporting and not having the knowledge to understand what's being said).

What is not being recognised is the severity and impact of those "some issues". 

It doesn't mean that overall the system didn't work as it should, for maybe >99.9% of transactions.  Which I'd say, given the complexity and variety of those transactions meant that it was - generally - "robust" (although that's a daft, subjective and undefined term which is open to interpretation).

What he, as a techie, maybe failed to appreciate is that, in the <0.01% of transactions, the impact of an error was that POL prosecuted SPMs for apparent fraud/theft.  



The questions that should be getting asked;

• What were those "some issues"
• Who did, or should have done, the impact analysis of those "some issues", particularly in terms of business consequence
• Who either didn't ask those questions, or failed to recognise that implications of the answers

Techie; "The auto-pilot software works fine most of the time, and that's a real achievement given the complexity of that code!"
Q:  "Are there no issues with it?"
Techie:  "Of course there are some issues - bugs - it's software and there'll always be bugs"
Q:  "How are those bugs resolved?"
Techie:  "Well, we're working through them gradually, and fixing them when we find them, so it'll all be OK".
Q: "Who's aware of the bugs?"
Techie:  "Well, my team are, 'cos we're fixing them, and my management, and some of them probably get escalated somewhere, but no-one's too interested in the techie stuff"
Q:  "Looking through the defect list, bug ref X0036625-axxn-05, looks pretty serious, what happens if that occurs?"
Techie:  "Oh, the plane's engines switch off"