Serving Subpostmaster asks about fraud

Hi everyone

I am supposed to be writing a pitch for my next book, but I a) thought you might appreciate a news round up and b) am a world-class procrastinator, so, killing two birds with one stone, here is all the Post Office news which is fit to print:

Tim’s pertinent query

This is an itch I can’t help but scratch – was anyone at Fujitsu or the Post Office removing money from the network and allowing innocent Subpostmasters to take the hit? It’s a question the serving Yalding Subpostmaster Tim Chapman has asked in a letter to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

Tim has kindly allowed me to print his letter, which details his own experience. Alongside it, I have written up some notes detailing the tantalising lack of evidence we have. Some things unravel slowly.

Do have a look at “Were some Subpostmaster discrepancies down to internal fraud?” and if you know more than I do, get in touch. All correspondence is dealt with in absolute confidence. Just hit reply to this email.

Inquiry final phase timetable published

The witness list for the seventh and likely final phase of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has been published. I haven’t yet decided which days I’ll commit to attending, but I hope the two Subpostmaster non-execs Saf and Elliot have something interesting to say, and I’ll certainly be there for Henry Staunton, Alisdair Cameron, Sarah Munby, Kevin Hollinrake and Kemi Badenoch.

View the current full list of witnesses here.

Legal fatcats are a-troughing

A freedom of information request by The Lawyer magazine has revealed the amount of cash the Post Office has given to fifteen (!) law firms fighting Subpostmasters during the second (cover-up) and third (justice and redress) phases of this scandal. It is £259m.

As the Daily Mail has noted, this is nearly as much as has been paid out to Subpostmasters in compensation. The quote from Womble Bond Dickinson (who represented the Post Office during the High Court litigation) is the one which sticks in the craw. WBD apparently has “great sympathy for all those affected by the issues being investigated by the Horizon public inquiry and recognises the very real personal impact these have had on sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses.”

That sympathy was in markedly short supply back in 2018 when WBD were trying to argue that the earth was flat and the Post Office had no duty of care to its Subpostmasters whatsoever.

Herbert Smith Freehills, who trousered the majority (£163m) of the taxpayers cash spaffed on lawyers have “immense” sympathy, a sentiment expressly built out of the inept Horizon Shortfall Scheme, which kicked off the third phase of this scandal back in 2020 and is still tying some applicants up in knots to this day.

Unlike journalists, not all lawyers are awful, and I feel honour bound to give a special mention to Flora Page who has not only diligently fought the Subpostmasters’ corner since she volunteered to get involved back in 2020, but also regularly donated a portion of her subsequent income to the Horizon Scandal Fund, which helps former Subpostmasters and their families who remain in need.

Flora has been asked to present the fifth Heilbron Lecture at the Art Worker’s Guild in Central London on 19 November this year. Her talk is called: “No Choice but to Trust – The Predicament of the Powerless”. You can buy tickets here.

Speaking of lawyers giving lectures

Professor Richard Moorhead is also at it, gadding about the country presenting not one, but three lectures in Exeter (30 Oct), Leeds (6 Nov) and London (13 Nov). They are the Hamlyn lectures, which I am told are a big deal. To emphasize how big a deal they are, Baroness Hale is introducing the first, Paul Gilbert is introducing the second, and Lord Arbuthnot id doing the grand finale. Richard says “the Post Office Scandal will feature prominently, but it won’t solely be about that”. Each lecture is different. If you want to see them all, you can pick up free (free!) tickets via the links posted on Richard’s substack here. You only need to pick one, but you can go to all three if you like.

If you are unable to follow Prof Moorhead around the country but want to find out what he has to say on all three occasions, you have wait until they get turned into a (probably leather-bound) book, which all sounds rather grand, and rightly so.

Post Office spaffs yet more cash

According to PR Week, the Post Office is giving £2m of its (your) money over the next four years to a PR firm called Red Brick Road. Red Brick Road will be supplying PR; social; influencer activity; partnerships; email comms; creative and production; SEO; content strategy, analytics and evaluation; customer relationship management; and digital advertising.

“Influencer activity”, eh? That’ll be fun. A Post Office spokesperson told PR Week: “Ensuring we can continue to highlight the vital role our branches and Postmasters play in their communities and the products we offer is essential to our business and the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people who rely on Post Office.”

It’s hard not to think that money would not be better spent on keeping the Horizon show on the road. Computer Weekly has reported on what looked a temporary but wide-scale system collapse last week.

Met rozzers not up to it

A worrying report in Professional Security magazine notes that Metropolitan Police investigations have been rated “inadequate”, according to official inspectors. Guess who is looking into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal…

In fact, Operation Olympus (misspelt for more than a year in official communications as Operation Olympos) gets a special mention in the article, quoting Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, who is recorded as saying there are “really deep systematic challenges to policing in London” including “the Post Office Inquiry, which is building and which we are co-ordinating nationally”. This has led to a “prioritisation and focus …. on a narrower front than we would ideally want to do”.

Well, at least, after nearly five years of investigation, the Met’s focus on the Post Office is getting results, isn’t it…? Isn’t it…?

Utah saints

Last week I had the pleasure of explaining more about the Post Office scandal to the International Academy of Trial Lawyers in Utah. I didn’t want to say too much about it beforehand in case it didn’t happen, or was a disaster, but it appeared to pass off without incident so I feel able to share a bit more about it.

After the talk I presented a Post Office safe key to the IATL president, Karen Burgess. This was given to me by former Penmaenmar Postmaster Helen Walker three years ago.

Helen kept hold of the key as an act of resistance when the Post Office stole her reputation and livelihood (read more here). I felt it might make a resonant gift for our American brethren, and Helen kindly gave me her permission to pass it on.

In doing so, Helen said: “That key is symbolic of unlocking the truth… [it] represented the trust in me to look after more money than I’d ever seen before – sometimes in excess of £30,000, which was extremely daunting. When you think you have ‘lost’ some of that money, the guilt and worry is far worse than if you had lost any money that was your own.”

After passing the key on to Karen I was touched and honoured to see her wearing it around her neck that evening at the event’s gala dinner. Karen has also asked to get in touch with Helen. Both people, frankly, are class acts, as are the members and fellows of the IATL who could not be more interested in what happened over here.

It was all quite an experience, and it was great to be able to use the opportunity to fly south to Arizona (see below) to spend some time seeing friends. I am now firmly back in harness. I’ll hopefully get another newsletter out before too long. Do keep the correspondence coming and thanks for being a secret emailer.

Best

Nick