Bad Faith: The culture of corporate and government deceit

[slowcoach]

This week a drama documentary "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office" aired and all of a sudden the Police and the Prime Minister are right in there standing up for Justice for the victims of the largest miscarriage of justice in UK legal history, or perhaps not quite that far back. The short story is that 700+ sub-postmasters were prosecuted, many imprisoned, and perhaps very many more defrauded, all by an organisation abetted by its legal henchmen that knew the victims were almost certainly innocent. And continued to do so for many years after evidence that these prosecutions constituted corporate crimes was in the public domain.

For why? The simplest answers is that they had spent about 1,000,000,000 pounds on a dysfunctional counter IT system that produced fictional accounts, fictional losses, resulting in very real demands that the victims make up the erroneous shortfalls, and if they couldn't or wouldn't pay up prosecuted them, rejoicing in their success rates, inflated by bullying people into pleading guilty or risk serving long prison sentences. They maintained this stance for more than a decade even when it was quite clear that the corporation and their legal teams were deliberately abusing their powers and the legal system, committing perjury whilst filling their boots.


Despite the evidence to the contrary they maintained that the IT system was not at fault. Rather than admit that the whole IT project was a disaster and that it should never have been implemented, they terrorised, and on occasion to the point of suicide, their innocent victims.

The IT system was not fixed, prosecutions were still being mounted 15+ years after it was first piloted and found to be faulty.

From Mr Bates vs The Post Office:

Mr Bates vs. The Post Office is a four-part British television drama series for ITV, written by Gwyneth Hughes, directed by James Strong and starring an ensemble cast led by Toby Jones. The series is a dramatisation of the British Post Office scandal, a miscarriage of justice in which hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted privately and publicly for theft, false accounting or fraud. It was broadcast on 1 January 2024

ETA:

How was this even possible?

Sometime previously, the government granted certain judicial powers to a number of public and private organisations, such as local councils, the RSPCSA, and the Post Office. This had the effect of outsourcing a swathe of prosecutions and removing associated costs off the governments books.

As I understand it, this resulted in the Post Office being:

The Investigating Body
The Prosecuting Authority
Chief witness for the Prosecution

and if the Beeb is right, the first point of appeal.

FWIW, once dismissed as postmasters the victims had no further access to their Post Office Counter computerised accounting records.

[Baz Faz]

As an extra pressure many submasters were falsely told that each one was the sole criminal.

[slowcoach]

Jan 8, 2024 14:31:28 GMT 2 Baz Faz said:

As an extra pressure many submasters were falsely told that each one was the sole criminal.

Lawyers lying was a key feature and remains so:

They need some victims to get prison terms in order to persuade the rest to plead guilty.

An early case was that of jailing of the then pregnant Surrey post-mistress Seema Misra.


Here is the lawyer lying about his part in her downfall to the Horizon Inquiry:

rixo
Celebratory email over jailed woman ‘not my language’ - Post Office solicitor

former Post Office lawyer has admitted to the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal that a celebratory email he sent following a prosecution was ‘at odds’ with his professional duties.

The inquiry heard today that Jarnail Singh, senior lawyer in the Post Office criminal law team, wrote to colleagues following the prosecution in 2010 of Seema Misra with an email titled ‘Attack on Horizon'.

Noting that Misra had blamed shortfalls at her branch on the Horizon IT system he wrote that, given the result, ‘it is to be hoped the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon’.

Singh also wrote that the Post Office had been able to ‘destroy’ any argument put forward by pregnant Surrey post-mistress Misra, who was sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and false accounting. She was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

Asked by inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC whether writing this email was at odds with his professional duties as a solicitor, Singh replied: ‘Of course.’

The inquiry heard that Post Office executives replied to Singh that the outcome of the case was an ‘excellent result’ and ‘brilliant news’.

Jarnail Singh

Singh during today's inquiry

Source: Post Office Inquiry

Singh denied that he had seen Misra’s defence as an attack on Horizon, despite his email being titled exactly that. He said the email’s contents had been dictated to him by a ‘collection of people’ and approved by Rob Wilson, then head of the criminal law team.

Singh said he was ‘hurt quite badly’ by Misra going to prison and, when asked if he viewed her case as a chance to stop others ‘bashing Horizon’, replied: ‘Absolutely not. You can ask me 10 times and the answer is going to be no no no.

‘It was not my language, I would not write anything like that,’ he added. ‘I was a traditional old-school lawyer and this sort of thing is not for me.’

The inquiry heard that in 2013 Singh sent another internal email referring to the ‘passing bandwagon’ of Horizon challenges and predicting that ‘when we get a few wins under our belt the Horizon challenges will melt away like the midnight snow’.

Beer asked Singh why he had written that, to which he replied: ‘I don’t know.’

Beer continued: ‘Are you struggling because you realise the crassness of what you wrote and you don’t have a justification?’ Singh said: ‘Not at all.’

Singh said his biggest mistake was believing Horizon was reliable and not questioning evidence that investigators had collected.

The inquiry heard that in 2014, Singh was approached by members of the Post Office's communications team to give some background on the Misra prosecution in response to revived media interest in her case.

Singh replied with a suggested quote which concluded: ‘It is to be hoped the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon’. Again he told the inquiry these words did not reflect how he felt about the case. The inquiry heard that the PR person rejected his suggested quote saying it was ‘too emotive for us to use’.

In a fuller summary he subsequently provided for the communications team, Singh wrote that the jury in the Misra case ‘was entitled to reject her evidence as absurd and to conclude that her belated attack on Horizon was nothing but a desperate distraction tactic’.

Singh is due to give further evidence on Friday, with a focus on the build-up to the prosecutions.

[slowcoach]

More on Jarnail Singh:

The Post Office’s senior criminal lawyer, who was involved in a string of prosecutions, sent an email to a number of executives celebrating the conviction of Seema Misra, a post office operator, in 2010.

Misra collapsed in court when her sentence was handed down, spent 15 months in jail and has said she would have taken her own life if she had not been eight months pregnant while incarcerated.

Emails have revealed that Post Office lawyers had a report about a Horizon bug creating shortfalls at 40 branches but this was not disclosed to the defence at Misra’s trial.

By the time of that trial investigative journalism had been published detailing the problems with the Horizon system in Computer Weekly.

[Scrubb]

I've read some discussion of this case. There are other postmasters who did commit suicide as a result of being blamed and fired/prosecuted.

It's just so awful, and it seems that those responsible were doing it deliberately, and have not been held accountable AT ALL.

[kuskiwi]

That's awful.

[slowcoach]

Jan 9, 2024 21:38:26 GMT 2 kuskiwi said:

That's awful.

It's typical.

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What is not so clear is that the strongest vitriol should be reserved for the government, the judiciary, and the accountancy and legal profession.

People for whom it is all a game.

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BTB long ago, I did some work on computerised accounts including General Ledgers. My recollection is that in order to still balance an error in one account would have to met with an equal error in another account; an unlikely event to occur by accident.

The size of the error is unimportant. I have spend an age looking for a missing ha'penny, it was a rounding error.

Surely when one set of accounts show that millions are being embezzled that should also show up as a discrepancy in assets.

Wouldn't alarm bells have rung if money was both being embezzled whilst nothing was going missing?

Or when corporate accounts don't add up are they fudged?

[OnlyMark]

Probably left hand and right hand.
Probably if the computer system said money was missing it was blindly believed without any checks.
Probably anyone who spoke up was jumped on.

I once thought that if the prosecutions were handled by the police rather than the Post Office who acted as judge, jury and executioner, it wouldn't have gone so far - but then I read of the situation in Scotland where there were many prosecutions by the Procurator Fiscal as the Post Office had no power there to do it themselves, that still resulted in convictions.
I tend to think that as they can only act on the information passed to them by the Post office, much conflicting evidence was hidden, deliberately or not. In effect, they didn't have the full true picture.

[Netsuke]

Bad Faith. Sounds like a sixties rock band from Nether Wallop.

[slowcoach]

Jan 10, 2024 11:18:55 GMT 2 OnlyMark said:

I once thought that if the prosecutions were handled by the police rather than the Post Office who acted as judge, jury and executioner, it wouldn't have gone so far - but then I read of the situation in Scotland where there were many prosecutions by the Procurator Fiscal as the Post Office had no power there to do it themselves, that still resulted in convictions.

I may come back to this but for now I suspect that, at least prior to 2009, it would have made little difference who was running the prosecution. Some of those who had there convictions overturned where CPS cases. But there is no suggesting that the CPS and the Scots acted in Bad Faith, I cannot see how they could. I fully expect that the Inquiry will show that The Post Office lawyers etc., did.


I was surprised bu the following concept (highlighted)

Parliamentary Question from 2022:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether he has plans to assess the legal presumption of reliability of computer evidence.

The short answer was NO!

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At the recommendation of the Law Commission, this presumption replaced Section 69 of the PACE (which more or less presumed that opposite) from 1999 onwards when that section  was repealed.
but
It is alleged that the recommendation was motivated by the need to avoid the time and effort required to show to a court that the computer that was the source of the evidence was operating and operated correctly. It is also alleged that they sought expert opinions which they chose to misrepresent in order to come to a conclusion the opposite that of the expert opinions



Without S.69 thr defence was severely hampered until the group action gave them the mass and money to show that Horizon was not reliable-