Comment by amiga386
6 days ago
I'm going to have to pull you up on this detail, as you seem to care about the details.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
Indeed. Fujitsu were totally complicit in the false accusations and the coverup.
Thank you for the added detail.
Fujistu is a business - they're gonna lie and do all kinds of shady things to maximize profits, avoid litigation etc. Nobody expects a big business to be ethical or even do only legal things at this point.
It is the prosecutors conduct that is maddening here. They need to have higher standards - it is their job to prosecute actual criminal behavior, and not be lazy in fact checking
Firstly, no, people do expect big business to act legally. Businesses should not "lie and do all kinds of shady things", and it's up to regulators (and those they harm, using the courts) to hold them to account.
Secondly, I don't think you understand the situation if you talk about the "prosecutors conduct". The Post Office itself - a private company (owned by the government at arms length) - was the entity doing the prosecuting. These were private prosecutions.
You're hearing it right. The aggrieved party is also the prosecutor, in the criminal courts. They are not a claimant in the civil courts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#England_an...
The Crown Prosecution Service (who work with the police, act for the government and prosecute most criminal cases in England and Wales) were not involved. In fact, much of the criticism of the CPS in the Post Office scandal is that they could have been involved; they had the statutory right to take over a prosecution, and if appropriate, discontinue it due to lack of evidence. But they did not intervene.
Should everyone expect (in many cases, reward) businesses to prioritize profits over human dignity?
It's mad we let such organizations run systems for us, let alone exist in the first place. If they were humans, they'd be labeled sociopaths.