Lee Castleton OBE

FUJITSU GETS PAID AGAIN @ComputerWeekly reports the Post Office is likely to extend Fujitsu's Horizon contract past March 2027. Fujitsu extensions since 2019: nearly £200m. Fujitsu's committed share of compensation: no figure yet. Who keeps signing the cheques?

WHO WERE THE LAWYERS WORKING FOR? In 2013 the Post Office's own barrister warned its expert witness had not disclosed known Horizon bugs. Convicted subpostmasters weren't told for years. Lawyers owe a duty to the court, not just the client. Who held them to it?

THE WHISTLEBLOWER WHO CRACKED THE BIGGEST SCANDAL IN UK LEGAL HISTORY Richard Roll @Fujitsu worked on the Horizon system. In 2015 he went on @BBCPanorama and told them Fujitsu engineers had remote access to subpostmaster accounts and could change the numbers in secret. @PostOffice called that impossible. It was their entire defence. 700 people had already been prosecuted on the back of it. Post Office response: send lawyers to intimidate the journalists' sources. Hide Roll's identity from them. Call it a briefing. Call it protecting the brand. Roll gave evidence in the 2019 High Court case. It helped prove the system was defective. Convictions started falling. Since the @ITV drama aired, Fujitsu has collected around £510 million in new UK government contracts. Victims are still waiting for compensation. One man spoke up in 2015. The institution spent a decade making sure nobody heard him. Sources: @BBCPanorama / @ComputerWeekly / @guardian / Others

SHE WAKES UP SCREAMING A grandmother of 8 still wakes up screaming at night. @postoffice prosecuted her in open court, which is a very efficient way to inform a whole village. Allison Henderson ran the small village post office in Worstead, Norfolk. In 2010 a Post Office's computer, said £12K was missing. Computers never get things wrong, so naturally she was the suspect.. Auditors arrived on 10 February 2010 and first said £18K was gone. A couple of hours later the figure fell to £12K, the fastest discount in Norfolk. She was suspended without pay that same day.. She says Post Office investigators then accused her of theft and marched her to the car park to see if her cheap Proton was worth taking. Her lawyers advised her to plead guilty to false accounting, which means signing off figures that were wrong, so the theft charge would be dropped. She says she was terrified of prison and was told not to mention Horizon in court.. A fair trial with the only relevant topic banned. On 15 December 2010 she got 200 hours of unpaid work and £1,400 in costs. Her own lawyers cost another £7K, and her husband took out a loan to repay the £12K. She says she repaid around £15K in total for money she never took, and customer satisfaction was not surveyed.. The court said 200 hours. Post Office added a lifetime at no extra charge.. She says she still wakes up screaming and takes antidepressants. She says old friends crossed the road to avoid her, and that she once considered taking her own life. Her husband quit as chair of the parish council. Her cleaning business folded when a customer asked for a background check, and in 2016 they left the village. Her 8 grandchildren were told nothing for 11 years. On 23 April 2021 the Court of Appeal quashed her conviction along with 38 others, known as the Post Office 39. The court said Post Office knew there were serious issues with Horizon and had a clear duty to investigate. Good to see a court explain that investigating is part of the job. A Post Office case review in 2014 noted she had never admitted false accounting before pleading guilty. In December 2014 her MP Norman Lamb @normanlamb wrote to Post Office boss Paula Vennells @PaulaVennells1 about her case. Her conviction stood for another 6 years. Rob Wilson, the former Post Office head of criminal law, was questioned at the public inquiry about her case. He also accepted it was his stated view that Post Office should grit its teeth and keep prosecuting.

FUNERAL EVE INTERVIEW Louise Dar was 7 months pregnant when she faced the auditors. The day before her mother's funeral, Louise Dar was questioned. Post Office called it a formal interview, which is a lovely name for asking a grieving woman where the money went. I read Louise Dar's sworn statement to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry. She took over the village post counter in Lenzie, near Glasgow, in November 2014. She is a mum of 3 and a former IT analyst, and before opening she asked for training on what to do when the books do not balance. She says she was fobbed off, and that a trainer told her cost cutbacks had shrunk the course from 5 days to 3. On day one, she says, auditor Margaret Guthrie suggested she had taken the £977, even though they had been together all day. Louise Dar says Margaret Guthrie had entered the stamps wrongly herself and could not find her own mistake. Her advice for future trouble was to get on with it and ring the helpline. Reassuring stuff from the person sent to check everyone else's sums. Then the audits came. In July 2015 about £10,500 was found missing and her branch shut for 6 weeks. She repaid £877 a month for 18 months. Two more audits found about £2,500 in 2016 and £6,900 in 2017. She says losses kept appearing while she was locked out of the system .... She says she paid or had deducted over £44,000. Her mother-in-law sold jewellery to help. She says her contracts manager Brian Trotter asked her several times to admit falsifying the books. Persistence like that deserves a bonus.. Her mother died suddenly in March 2017. She says Post Office summoned her to a formal interview the day before the funeral and accused her of stealing. Thoughtful scheduling, really. Her appointment ended on 27 March 2017 and she was never charged. Her mother never saw her proved right. Post Office tells it differently. It says her appointment ended for repeated failures to account for cash and stock, and for being unable to explain or repay the last shortfall. It says its investigation found falsified entries under her assistant's login and that she later accepted she was responsible for an unexplained currency gap. Its barrister put it to her in the High Court that the losses came from her or her staff's dishonesty or errors. She denied it and said the helpline once told her to change stock figures. Its barrister said that did not happen. She said it categorically did. She was one of 6 lead claimants for 555 postmasters in the High Court case against Post Office, which left her outside the Historic Shortfall Scheme. She told the Inquiry on 11 May 2022 that her payments hardly touched her debts. In January 2024 she asked Police Scotland @PoliceScotland to investigate. It said it was not investigating at that time. The government owns Post Office and the Department for Business and Trade runs the compensation, so the owner is also the claims desk. Very handy. Louise Dar asked for troubleshooting training. @PostOffice gave her the trouble.