Archives :
Prosecutions
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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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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…
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Calling former Subpostmasters, managers and Post Office employees…
Professor Richard Moorhead will be known to some of you. He writes a well-regarded legal ethics blog (“Lawyer Watch“) and a free substack site dedicated to matters arising from the Post Office Horizon scandal. He is also a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board. In addition to this Prof Moorhead has been running various…
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Post Office auditor signed Court statement containing info she knew was false
Helen Rose is a former Post Office auditor and investigator. Mrs Rose has no formal auditing qualifications or training, no training she can recall on the Post Office Horizon IT system and no formal training in investigation. She is also the author of the Helen Rose report, which provided some of the first concrete evidence…
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Prof Moorhead: “Crass does not come close”
Following a Q&A with one member of the independent Horizon Compensation Advisory Board (Lord Arbuthnot) earlier this week, I am delighted to bring you another. Richard Moorhead is Professor of Legal Ethics at Exeter University and a respected industry blogger. He has taken a close professional interest in the legal failings which contributed to the…
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Lord Arbuthnot: “I feel we are heading in the right direction”
Last week the Sunday Times asked me to write a piece about the Post Office scandal. The result can be read here. In the course of researching the article I picked up a lot of interesting material which, for reasons of space, didn’t make the final cut. Rather than let some good stuff go to…
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The Post Office Race Equality duty in the application of its prosecutorial powers
Dr Minh Alexander is back. Dr Alexander contacted me a few years ago when she was alarmed to hear that The Reverend Paula Vennells had sailed into a job running an NHS Trust. Dr Alexander felt The Revd Vennells’ active attempts to play down and possibly suppress the Post Office scandal whilst CEO of the…
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Current Post Office Horizon IT issues
The Post Office’s Horizon IT system was described as in a 2019 High Court judgment as being “not remotely robust” between 2000 and 2010. Between 2010 and 2017 it was described as “slightly more robust… but still had a significant number of bugs, errors and defects”. The same judgment also said that after 2017 Horizon…
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Rod Ismay: the useful idiot
I was expecting more from Rod Ismay. He was, after all, an Ernst and Young auditor – one of the finest bean counters money can buy. Ismay joined the Post Office in 2003 after spending 11 years at the accounting giant, where, amongst other things, he was one of the Post Office’s auditors. Rod Ismay…
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The ‘Shredding’ Advice
Last week I published the first Clarke advice, which was effectively a THIS ENDS HERE. NOW document written by Simon Clarke, an external barrister working on Subpostmaster prosecutions To give context to the initial advice, I have updated that post with some (hopefully) helpful links. The Shredding Advice Shortly after writing his first advice, Mr…