Epic fail on the part of those "honours committees".

They should have known not to honour somebody who was going to get caught.

"They should have known not to honour somebody who was going to get caught."

The Tories thought they, Vennells and Fujitsu had indeed got away with it. Vennells was awarded the CBE in 2019, a decade after Computer Weekly broke the story of the failings of Horizon. The Tories banked all the donations from Fujitsu (or supposedly from their employees personal pockets), and they were all very pleased with themselves.

I hope Vennells life today is a living hell, like her organisation made the lives of people falsely blamed by her organisation. So hopefully she's stressed, anxious, in fear of personal prosecution, vilified by the people she encounters. I also hope that the many other people who are accountable are under similar pressure. And I hope that Fujitsu's UK business is shut down, but fat chance of that - keep donating to the Tories and the contracts keep rolling in - 150 new contracts since the PO stopped its Horizon prosecutions, and over £100m a year from the public purse.

I would consider myself a natural Conservative voter, but haven't voted for them for two decades now - a hollow, unstable party without vision or intelligence, that considers government it's right, and considers the purpose of government to be one of perpetuation and self enrichment. The sooner this shower of shit are out of office the better.

This was a scandal from the start and the fact that we are only now seeing robust action from politicians after the whole sad affair was dramatised on TV says a lot about their lack of interest in the hundreds of lives ruined by Fujitsu and Royal Mail's incompetence, arrogance and lies.

Words fail me to express my disgust at how this has been handled.

What's galling is that Computer Weekly (? I forget the name of the trade paper) & Private Eye both shone a light on the scandal repeatedly and it was brushed under the rug. Also, didn't Panorama also have an investigative show on it.

This is a punching problem; where the families of all those affected get to punch fujitsu & vennells repeatedly until we have a different type of problem. (Violence is not the answer of course, but money and exoneration isn't going to give any _real closure_ to some of those affected).

Many people consider Private Eye as Fortean Times of politics and easily dismiss anything written there as a conspiracy theory.

Computer Weekly could also be mistaken for some tinfoil blog by majority of people.

Even if it was reported by mainstream media, most people would have dismissed this as a curiosity, something improbable.

Especially when no action taken place against the Post Office.

If it was serious, surely police would have investigated it?

It really shows how corrupt to the core the country is.

@malfeasance is right. Private Eye has been on about it for years. Computer Weekly too. And I think it was last year Panorama did an hour long documentary on it.

The significance of the TV drama has nothing to do with it reaching a wider audience. The significance here is that this is an election year . The current party have been battered with bad press and are double digits behind Labour in terms of popularity. What better way to address that by being seen to do something to help poor affected folk like this? If this drama had come out 12 months ago I doubt we'd have had this reaction we've seen.

But you are also right, it's just yet another demonstration of how corrupt the UK is. Politicians here are using the pain and suffering that they (directly/indirectly) caused for their own benefit.

Well said.

It's only taken her 20 years to make an empty, token gesture. I bet she's still handing on to her pension and golden handshake money. I still can't fathom why she hasn't already been tried and several years into a very long prison sentence.

is to turn them into poor people. - Billy Ray Valentine.

You know what they say. A billionaires biggest fear...becoming a millionaire.

As W S Gilbert wrote in the Mikado [1]Let the punishment fit the crime .

[1] https://gsarchive.net/mikado/webopera/mk206.html

"It's only taken her 20 years to make an empty, token gesture."

Yes, but she's only had the CBE since 2019. Bigger questions need to be asked about why she was awarded it when the Horizon scandal was already known.

"It's not possible so many people were in on it"

"Haha yeah gremlins were making a loss. Fix your tinfoil hat"

"Surely courts wouldn't get it wrong so many times? What are you smoking?"

and so on and so on...

So many people are now silent.

How about Sunak and Starmer returning the 'bungs' that Fujitsu paid them along with the bungs from Pietas a consultancy company run by a Simon Blagden mentioned here https://www.vice.com/en/article/59x7wz/fujitsu-uk-sues-department-health-simon-blagden-tory-donor.It seems also that Fujitsu like to sue when their contracts don't get renewed.

Of course, those who approve of Blue Corruption will mark me down. You lot need to have a word with yourselves.

Fujitsu "shouldn't" be on the hook for compensation, Post Office signed off on the software as being acceptable for service, the execs on the other hand, should be as no doubt the reliability was brought up in meetings and for P.O to stand up and say nothing wrong with the software, would have required Fujitsu complicity.

I can't see why not?

It's like someone hiring a cowboy builder, who does something that looks great for someone who didn't study as a surveyor, but really should have never been accepted.

I'd say that all contracts won by cowboys should now be independently reviewed.

It's not even as simple as that - if you read the Private Eye articles on it, supposedly they had people in the background manipulating data remotely to help hide the issues with the system. (iirc)

I seriously wonder how many convictions of postmasters for theft or fraud there have been from 1980 to 1989 (pre Horizon) and from 2010 until now (post Horizon). Seven hundred supposedly dishonest postmasters, shouldn’t that have been a suspiciously high number?

>>shouldn’t that have been a suspiciously high number?

It was, and recognised as such which is why the PO and Fujitsu services (aka ICL) worked so hard to rush prosecutions through the PO courts (not the normal court system) and had teams working to cover up remote tampering with figures and audit logs (allegedly).

My ex was probably a victim of Horizon issues, but, luckilly, they had noticed that people outside the PO were noticing problems with Horizon related prosecutions so they just fabricated "evidence" from "witnesses" who allegedly saw her giving money to "familly members over the counter" (none of her family were anywhere near the PO in which she worked - as in >100 of miles away for the nearest) and allowed to her to leave without further action...

> returning her CBE

Let's hope it arrives back safely