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New Books on the Post Office Scandal Out This Week
Read More…: New Books on the Post Office Scandal Out This WeekFormer Subpostmaster Pete Murray and current Professor Richard Moorhead have both written two very different books relating to the Post Office scandal. They are out this week. The Making and Breaking of a Subpostmaster I first spoke to Pete Murray whilst the Bates v Post Office group litigation was active. Pete had taken on the Hope Farm Road branch in Great Sutton in 2014, a year after being made Subpostmaster at Grove Road in Wallasey. Pete had not been told by the Post Office that the previous Subpostmaster at Hope Farm Road was Martin Griffiths, who took his own life…
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Project Brisbane to Remain Secret
Read More…: Project Brisbane to Remain SecretEleanor Shaikh has lost her court bid to have a single line in a government email unredacted. The line related to a top secret Post Office report called Project Brisbane. The Post Office has maintained that Brisbane and everything related to it is “legally privileged”, which means it is exempt from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. The ruling means we may never find out what it contains. The case came about when Shaikh asked the Post Office to unredact a line in an email by Tom Cooper, a UKGI employee and Post Office director. The email was sent to other…
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Postmaster announces legal action over Capture redress scheme
Read More…: Postmaster announces legal action over Capture redress schemeFormer Subpostmaster Lee Bowerman has announced his intention to “pursue legal action” over the financial compensation offer he has received through the Capture Redress Scheme. Writing to the Department of Business, Bowerman said it “follows my complete loss of confidence in the fairness, transparency and integrity of the assessment process and a scheme which is not fit for purpose.” The Capture system was a precursor to Horizon which compiled Subpostmaster accounts on a standalone desktop computer. It was supplied by the Post Office and contained software coding errors which miscalculated Subpostmaster accounts. According to a review by the company Kroll,…
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The Post Office scandal’s Postcode Lottery
Read More…: The Post Office scandal’s Postcode LotteryVictims of the Post Office Scandal are being treated differently in Scotland to those in England and Wales. The revelation has come through the work of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, an advisory panel which has alerted the government to the Post Office scandal’s own postcode lottery. Professor Chris Hodges, the chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, has written to Darren Jones, the current Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chief Secretary to the outgoing Prime Minister, urging action to deal with several outstanding problems related to the Post Office scandal. Two relate to different treatment of convicted…
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MacLeod and Gould prosecuted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority
Read More…: MacLeod and Gould prosecuted by the Solicitors Regulation AuthorityTwo solicitors with very different roles in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal are being prosecuted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and will face a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT). An SDT has the power to permanently remove an individual’s right to practice as a solicitor and leverage unlimited fines. Jane MacLeod is former General Counsel at the Post Office, which meant she was the top internal lawyer within the organisation. She took the post in January 2015. In April 2019 the interim Chief Executive of the Post Office Alisdair Cameron told her she was being sacked over her disastrous…
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The Battle for Brisbane
Read More…: The Battle for BrisbaneThe Post Office has claimed it should not make public crucial documents written six years ago, partly on the grounds doing so could compromise the organisation’s capacity to receive a fair trial, should it ever face criminal proceedings over the Horizon IT scandal. Project Brisbane is a top-secret exercise conducted in 2020 by the Post Office’s then-lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills. It is legally privileged, which means the Post Office cannot normally be forced to hand it over to the courts or even police investigators. Today, in an information tribunal, the Post Office said handing over Brisbane “risks harming the Post…
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Post Office Inquiry final report delayed yet again
Read More…: Post Office Inquiry final report delayed yet againThe final report of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry has been delayed once more. Although no publication date was ever formally announced, the process is taking longer than anticipated, and participants have been told we are now highly unlikely to see the final report delivered to parliament before September this year. In early 2025 I was told by sources close to the Inquiry that the Chair, Sir Wyn Williams, initially hoped to publish his final report in full in December 2025. Sir Wyn published volume one of the final report (dealing with human impact and compensation) in July 2025.…
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Shoreham, Ropetackle Arts Theatre 2 July: The Great Post Office Cover-Up
Read More…: Shoreham, Ropetackle Arts Theatre 2 July: The Great Post Office Cover-UpOn Thursday 2nd July I will be delivering my first (and so far only) public talk this year on the Post Office scandal. It will be at the Ropetackle Arts Theatre in Shoreham-by-Sea and I’m very much looking forward to it. A lot has happened since we did that run of dates in 2024. I have written another book (the as-yet-unpublished The Great Post Office Cover-Up), which has given me a whole new insight into the scandal, and I am looking forward to sharing those insights with you, if you can make it down to the South Coast. You can…
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Post Office’s Jane MacLeod “significant individual” in criminal investigation
Read More…: Post Office’s Jane MacLeod “significant individual” in criminal investigationThe detectives running the investigation into possible criminal activity at the Post Office have indicated that former Post Office General Counsel, Jane MacLeod, is a “significant individual” to their criminal investigation. Operation Olympos is a long-running police investigation formed in the wake of the Bates v Post Office civil litigation. It used to be headed up by the Metropolitan Police, but since 2024 it has been led by the National Police Chiefs Council. The inference about MacLeod was made during an NPCC remote briefing for victims of the scandal which was held yesterday and hosted by Commander Stephen Clayman and…
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More info is revealed about Project Brisbane
Read More…: More info is revealed about Project BrisbaneI am once more grateful to Eleanor Shaikh and Matthew Somerville for bringing important information into the public domain. Matthew runs the “Dracos” Inquiry website which mirrors the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry website whilst making every document on it searchable. There is a manual element to Matthew’s work, which involves scanning the Inquiry website for new uploads. Over the weekend Matthew ran his first full scan since January and found 4,000 new documents had been uploaded to the official site. Eleanor Shaikh immediately started searching for more mentions of the mysterious 2020 report known as Project Brisbane, compiled by…
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