Archives :
Inquiry
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The Hatchet Man: Aujard gives evidence
Chris Aujard presents as thoughtful, intelligent and professional – a very different person to the one boasting about his crisis management skills shortly after leaving the Post Office in 2015. Older and wiser, perhaps, or better at image projection. Aujard was involved in a deliberate attempt to frustrate Second Sight’s independent investigation into the Post…
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The Bleatings of a Sorry Scapegoat: Susan Crichton’s Pity Party
Susan Crichton cut a sorry figure at the Inquiry today. A woman apparently trying to do the right thing, but not trying hard enough. A woman whose stated intentions were not borne out (and occasionally downright contradicted) by the documentary evidence. A woman who came up against a company board more interested in reputation management…
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Lord Arbuthnot and the Lies
The former MP who started the Parliamentary campaign to help Subpostmasters in their fight for justice, gave evidence at the public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal on Wednesday. James Arbuthnot told inquiry he was first alerted to potential problems with the Horizon system during a coffee morning in his constituency, in 2009,…
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Phase 5 & 6 curtain-raiser: Alan the Man
Founder of the justice for Subpostmaster alliance Alan Bates today gave evidence to the public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. The Inquiry has resumed withafter a five week break, and is now entering a four month period of hearings, combining phases five and six of the planned seven phases. Phases 5 &…
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Gary’s years of hurt
Let’s have a look at another one of the frontline plods who made it their business to investigate Subpostmasters and recommend them (or not) for prosecution based on what, at times, seems to be imaginary evidence. Gary Thomas (and this will shock you) started his career in the Post Office as a counter clerk, rising…
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More Singh’d against than Singh-ing
There has been some rank incompetence on display from various Post Office witnesses over the course of this inquiry, but I think we’ll have to go some way to find a worse performance than this. We know from the witnesses during Bates v Post Office and the Inquiry evidence we’ve heard over most of 2023…
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Criminal conspiracy: slowly joining the dots
A throwaway line in a piece of oral evidence at the Horizon IT inquiry yesterday may have revealed more about the cover-up which some are now openly calling a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice at the Post Office. The evidence came from Dave Pardoe, a former Senior Security Manager, invested with the…
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The Post Office vs Teju Adedayo
On 14 May 2021 Teju Adedayo had her criminal conviction quashed at Southwark Crown Court. Parmod Kalia, who had been convicted of theft, had his conviction quashed alongside Teju. In 2005 Teju took responsibility for £52,864 going missing from her branch and provided the Post Office with a “confession”, explaining she took £50,000 out of…
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The Magic Signature
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’ Lewis…
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Institutional investigative ignorance
Paul Whitaker, as it says in the screengrab above, used to be a Post Office Investigator (and, almost inevitably, before that, a postman). In his evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday, Mr Whitaker was taken to a 2011 email chain regarding his investigation into a Post Office branch in St John…