Thread by @nickwallis

Round up of reaction to reports that government will tomorrow announce Post Office Horizon IT inquiry will be put on a statutory footing, allowing cross-examination of witnesses on oath and subpoena-ing of documents.

postofficetrial.com/2021/05/govern…

BEIS (govt) statement:

"All parties are committed to cooperating with the independent inquiry underway, which is continuing to make progress under the chairmanship of Sir Wyn Williams….

… We continue to engage with relevant parties on all options available to ensure we get to the bottom of where mistakes were made, and to ensure something like this cannot happen again...

… The inquiry will also assess whether lessons have been learned and concrete changes have taken place or are underway at Post Office Ltd.”

ENDS

Quick precis for anyone new to this:

In 2019 two HUGE High Court judgments (in terms of length, intellectual endeavour, and impact) were handed down in a stunning victory for 555 Subpostmasters, led by Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance founder Alan Bates...

… the judgments exposed the appalling behaviour of the Post Office in sacking, prosecuting and criminalising its own Subpostmasters on IT evidence the judge found to be demonstrably shaky. It’s since emerged the Post Office prosecuted 736 people over a 14 year period...

…using evidence from its Horizon IT system, and as many as 700 of those prosecutions could be unsafe.

45 Subpostmasters have already had their convictions quashed, during that process at the Court of Appeal...

… it became apparent that in 2013/4, the Post Office board was made aware some of its prosecutions might be unsafe. The Post Office kept this information secret, delaying access to justice for the vast majority of people whose convictions might be unsafe...

Lord Arbuthnot has already called for a police investigation into the cover-up.

No Post Office executive has given an interview over what happened over the last 8 years. In 2015, the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells said their internal investigations had NOT...

… found any miscarriages of justice (when it was pretty clear they had) and then last year even AFTER the High Court judgments, Ms Vennells failed to disclose the existence of the 2013/4 Post Office investigations.

Williams may also want to ask Angela van den Bogerd from the Post Office and Andy Dunks from Fujitsu why they tried to mislead a High Court judge, and there is also the thorny issue of the ongoing police investigation into two former Fujitsu staff who gave evidence to the Crown

… and High Court about Horizon’s robustness.

Then there is the role of the government in all this. Which civil servant was signing off the Post Office’s attempts to deny justice to the Subpostmasters. Why were they doing it? What were they telling their ministers?

Lord Arbuthnot and Lord Falconer swant to know what Alex Chisholm (currently Chief Operating Officer for the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office) was telling the Post Office and his ministers whilst he was the Chief Accounting Officer at BEIS...

… also what were the roles of Susanah Storey (govt rep on the board of the Post Office during the cover-up - now top civil servant at DCMS) and Richard Callard (her successor on the PO board - still at UKGI)...

… basically the Post Office and government were made aware at the highest level that something very serious had gone wrong and instead of coming clean, they tried to bury it, which had the VERY VERY serious effect of denying wrongly criminalised Subpostmasters justice...

… I am very surprised that there are people in government and the Post Office who seemed to make a conscious (and possibly unlawful) decision that it was better potential miscarriages of justice were kept hidden than bring it into the open and deal with it. On a personal...

… integrity level, surely that’s unconscionable.

As a result of tomorrow’s likely announcement there’s a slightly better chance we might one day get to the truth.

Right. I have a secret email to write to my subscribers. Please buy a pre-sale copy of my book if you can...

… you get an invitation to the secret email list for free and my publisher is donating 10% of revenue to a fund to help hard-done-by Subpostmasters and their families:

store29806256.company.site

@threadreaderapp unroll pls