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The Horizon Post Office Scandal
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The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy tackles a story torn from today's headlines (about an issue that goes back to the late 90s), as we discuss the Horizon Post Office scandal. If you live in the UK, this may be a story you're familiar with, but for rest of us, it makes for a darkly fascinating affair. (Mentions of suicide, just in case that's problem for you.)
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcaster's Guide and Hosts
00:00:07
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Edison and Ian Denteth.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison. And in Dunedin, New Zealand, it is Associate Professor M.R. Extenteth. How's the South Island?
00:00:40
Speaker
Cold. Cold. Cold, but also very pleasant. It's not warm here. I've gone from 57 degrees Celsius down to 8 degrees Celsius, which is, as far as I know numerically, is about a 1,000 degrees Celsius difference. I mean, that's just how math works.
00:00:58
Speaker
So apart from ah shivering in your beds, what have you been doing? First, how long have you been in Dunedin and what have you got up to in that amount of time? So I arrived on Sunday and in that time I've co-taught two classes, I've sat in on an office hour, I've given a research talk and suffered from insomnia.
00:01:20
Speaker
Excellent. Insomnia or jet lag? No, no, last night was definitely insomnia. Jet lag, you eventually get to sleep. Insomnia, you just don't sleep at all.
00:01:32
Speaker
You know about insomnia, Joshua. I do. Yes, do. It's your dear friend. yeah But the the less said about the better, I think. Okay, so, and and I noticed you managed to to score yourself an appearance in the Otago Daily Times.
00:01:46
Speaker
I did. It's, I mean, i I am literally the talk of the town. Well, there we go. Front page news. Front page news. My face, front page, in a tinfoil hat. In a tinfoil hat, yes, I did see that. concerned that maybe the Department of Philosophy would be concerned about the bad press, but apparently all press is good press down here in Otago.
Hosts' Current Activities
00:02:09
Speaker
Very good. that's That's what you've been up to um But right now, what we're up to, of course, is recording a proper episode. What have you Joshua? What have you been up to? Oh, God, nothing at all. Nothing at all. I saw the new Jurassic World movie.
00:02:22
Speaker
I don't remember a thing about it. think that's all that can be said about that. Have you seen the new Superman movie? No, maybe this weekend. I have heard good things, though. But no, other than that, I don't think I've had... But you know what I haven't been doing?
00:02:36
Speaker
i haven't been... That's amazing. Let's not go there. I have not been destroying the lives of numerous postmasters around the country, which puts me one up on the British Post Office. Oh.
00:02:47
Speaker
Fair enough. yeah Which is what we're going to talk about today. um So this is a story... well let Let's play a chime, let's make a noise, and then we can start talking about it properly instead of introducing it and then playing a chime and then talking about the thing we just introduced. I'm going to play a chime.
00:03:08
Speaker
Right, that that that that feels better now. We're we're doing it properly. So, yes, what we want to talk about today is a story that i'm I'm assuming if you're listening to us from the UK, you're probably familiar with or have at least heard of, but but I haven't. Had you heard of this um before this week? Yes, I was i was aware of this because...
00:03:29
Speaker
Well, I said one of these weird things. So I knew of a TV series called Mr. Boat... Mr. Bait, not Mr. Boat. Mr. Boat vs. the Post Office is a completely different story we're not going into this week.
00:03:40
Speaker
I knew about the British TV series Mr. Bait vs. the Post Office. I wasn't aware... until I looked into it that actually it's based upon a true story. So I've been aware of this since the TV series came out at the end of last year, although the scandal itself is really, in many respects, quite old.
00:04:05
Speaker
but has only really been addressed by the British government due to the TV series in question.
Horizon Post Office Scandal Overview
00:04:13
Speaker
Indeed. So, yes, if you don't know Eamon's description what it is, we are talking about the Horizon Post Office scandal in the UK.
00:04:22
Speaker
um and And as you say, it's something that's that's come into focus in in the public consciousness in in recent times, but it goes all the way back to 1999. And at the at the heart of it all, we have the fact that from 1999 up until about 2015, around 1,000 sub-postmasters who are, I gather, in in the States, not the States, in the UK, the deal is like...
00:04:49
Speaker
The post office branches are run by these sub postmasters. who They're self-employed. They own their own business and they contract to the post office to operate as a bone to the post branch of the post office.
00:05:01
Speaker
And about a thousand of them have been prosecuted in either civil or criminal courts. So, sort of, at the the the
00:05:15
Speaker
artfl flags shortfalls in their accounts so sort of at at the end of the day according to the accounts They um supposedly took in X amount of money, and yet there was less than that.
00:05:27
Speaker
they They had less money in that, which meant a certain amount of money had gone missing, and they were blamed for that, claiming that they'd you know they'd embezzled it, that that'd they'd cooked the books or something to steal money from the post office.
00:05:38
Speaker
And these these were serious prosecutions. 236 people went to prison because of it. Prison or not, people who if if people who were convicted, the post office would use the Proceeds of Crime Act to seize their assets to make back the money, which had apparently gone missing.
00:05:52
Speaker
ah Even people who weren't convicted still had their contracts terminated and so they weren't able to operate as branch of the post office anymore. And some of them still had to pay out of their own pockets to cover these shortfalls, all on top, of course, of the social stigma of being branded a thief or or a fraud in public.
00:06:10
Speaker
And we should also point out some people died as a consequence of the scandal. oh yes. We will be getting to that. We will be getting into, yes. Yes, yes. No, the the the yeah the the consequences get even worse than that.
00:06:23
Speaker
And the reason why this is a scandal is that Horizon was buggy. I mean, I work in IT. yeah It's a fact that all software has bugs, but when it comes to accounting stuff, you want them to be...
00:06:37
Speaker
have as little impact as possible so that they wouldn't do things ah such as flag shortfalls that didn't actually exist. Now, I haven't seen, in the reading I've done, i haven't seen anywhere that sort of talks about the proportion of, is is it like all these shortfalls were were all wrong or just some of them, certainly a large amount of them, but I don't know whether it was most cases, ah the shortfalls or errors, all cases, guess.
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're in the kind of situation where because the bugs were systemic and occurred a lot, we're applying the principle of charity now and going, well, most of the prosecutions are going to be unsafe because it is very likely that most of the prosecutions are based upon buggy software other than fraud.
00:07:28
Speaker
So we're going to go for a false negative account here as opposed to false positive account. It does seem in that way, yes, yes. It's bit hard to know which is the positive or ne negative the falsity applies to in this case. Well, especially since we're talking about accounting. Now, full disclosure, I used to work for a software company that made accounting software.
00:07:49
Speaker
I worked there for 13 years. I still don't understand accounting. I believe that large parts of it were the people making stuff up specifically to mess with me. um And in particular, when you have sort of the double ledger accounting, that means any time you credit one account, you debit, make a corresponding debit in another account. So it's it's it's all, every positive has a negative anyway. It all works out in the end, except for when it doesn't because there are bugs in your software.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah bugs in your software that no one wants to admit are bugs and also bugs in your software you don't admit the bugs but you also deny exist and thus lie to the public about.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah so The history of Horizon, it was developed in 1996 as a payment system for for paying, particularly like like pension and payments or something that the post office handled.
00:08:42
Speaker
ah Apparently, it's an initial in its initial incarnation, it did not work very well, as often happens with government IT projects. We've seen a few of them in New Zealand as well. and but So then they pivoted and and then sort of redeveloped the system to use it as an electronic accounting system to replace the the paper-based systems that had been in use previously.
00:09:00
Speaker
Apparently, according to what I've read, it was the largest non-military IT contract in all of Europe. It was it was a big a big rollout. um Over time, it went through a few versions of it. There was the first version, which became eventually known as Horizon Legacy. That was from 1999 to 2010. Then an online version came out in and was updated to another new version Now, as I say, all all large IT systems are going to have bugs, and people apparently began reporting accounting issues in Horizon Legacy pretty much as soon as it went
00:09:36
Speaker
um they They all seem to be around sort of ah falsely like duplicating transactions or duplicating mid entries. So, you know, you you make a $100 transaction, but it accidentally records it twice. So now the system says you've received $200, but in reality you only received $100,
00:09:55
Speaker
soon anyone looks at looking at it thinks you're $100 short, that that sort of thing. And I guess if you encounter a bunch of these bugs many times, then it can add up. And sometimes they did add up. Well, yeah, so we're getting over 10,000 calls a month to the support line when they were reporting these technical problems. Now, admittedly, this is a rollout of a Accounting system to all of the post offices in Britain and is suspect because Britain's a large country there are a lot is gonna be a bunch of them here, but 10,000 calls a month is a lot of bug reports so
00:10:30
Speaker
it It was more than, I said over 10,000. I think it was sort of 12 to 15 or something. but But the problem is that the post office, as you say, always insisted that the information in Horizon was accurate, which meant that any shortfalls encountered would have be genuine. A computer can't wrong,
00:10:45
Speaker
A computer cannot wrong. Computers don't lie, no Oh. And, of course, there's a problem because the shortfalls weren't genuine and had been caused by a software error. Often when these sub-postmasters were accused of, you know, you've got this or any shortfall, they'd be like, I'm sorry, I just can't explain it. I don't know what's gone wrong, which just made them sound guilty in the post office's eyes.
00:11:06
Speaker
and and And as an example of this this inaction, um in 2003, for instance, the post office brought a civil case against a woman called Julie Wollstoneholm. They dropped the case.
00:11:18
Speaker
and She made a counterclaim. They settled her counterclaim out of court um after an expert brought in to testify said that these discrepancies that they had taken her to court over could have been caused by errors in the horizon.
00:11:30
Speaker
So that was 2003. Yeah, stress that year. 2003. yeah let's stress that year two thousand and three So in 2003, the post office is accepting that maybe some of the errors are due to a software bug in the software they're forcing sub-postmasters to use.
00:11:50
Speaker
And yet, Josh, when did
Challenges Against Horizon Software
00:11:51
Speaker
this report come out about the government reacting to the Horizon thing? this This week, yes. The most recent one, yes. um And in I think it's worse than that. I think it's not so much they they they didn't officially accept that there were errors. They settled so that um there wouldn't be a ruling that the errors existed.
00:12:11
Speaker
ah But they and they definitely, though, knew about them and yet continued to insist all along that Horizon was robust. that um that all of these errors were on this part of the sub-postmasters, not part of the system, and that they were therefore justified in taking them to court.
00:12:29
Speaker
So at this point, I guess we should introduce Mr. Alan Bates. Yes, as played by Toby Jones. As played by Toby Jones in the miniseries, yes. Tell me about Mr. Bates.
00:12:40
Speaker
Well, Mr Bates was a... du I can't remember whether he was Welsh or he was simply operating ah post office in the north of Wales. think Toby Jones is Welsh. I'm assuming Mr Bates must have been... Actually, Bates is a very Welsh last name. I don't know why I'm talking about the...
00:12:58
Speaker
the ethnicity of Mr Bates. Mr Bates is a person who lives in Wales, operated a post office in Wales. So Mr Bates and his partner, I'm assuming Mrs Bates, although you can't quite tell.
00:13:11
Speaker
ah miss oh and Mrs tells you there's a Mr, but a Mr doesn't tell you there's a Mrs. They do not share a surname, but um she is so I don't know if they're actually married or not, but yeah, him and his partner.
00:13:25
Speaker
Yeah, so Alan Bates and his partner bought a post office in the north of Wales back in the year of our Lord in 1988. That's the year before Horizon Legacy comes yeah yeah comes into account.
00:13:40
Speaker
When it comes online, they start seeing problems in their ledger fairly quickly, one of which is a shortfall of a mere £6,000.
00:13:51
Speaker
bowwels and pounds And this seems to be due to a transaction which has been duplicated during a software upgrade of Horizon Legacy. So essentially, software is installed, ledger gets updated, and one of the entries suddenly appears not once but twice.
00:14:10
Speaker
Now, Bates finds other errors, and normally he can find a reason as to why that error has occurred. So software upgrade creates a duplicate,
00:14:21
Speaker
a double entries put into a all ledger, etc., etc., and is able to kind of correct for those errors in real time. But he does end up in a situation where there's a £1,000 shortfall that he basically can't track down. He knows that from a logistical perspective, there's £1,000 which has basically ah appeared in the accounts that isn't in the actual Cashier?
00:14:47
Speaker
ah yeah Register. No, the machine. You put the money. Register. Register. Thank you. Cash register. Cashier registrar, as I'm sure our friends in France say, we're sure they don't.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah. So he's unable to locate where this 1,000 additional pounds has occurred in Horizon Legacy. And this is, by the by, a fairly small shortfall compared to some of the issues people had with Horizon Legacy.
00:15:18
Speaker
So he talks to area managers to say, well, no, what do I do with this particular thing? And he's not willing to accept that the horizon figures are accurate.
00:15:29
Speaker
So basically, he rolls over the £1,000 on a year-by-year basis. it doesn't zero it out. He simply goes, well, look, this is £1,000, which can't be accounted for.
00:15:42
Speaker
It can't be accounted for in this financial year. we we'll just roll it over to the next financial year. Eventually, the post office gets a little bit annoyed by the fact that he's not dealing with the £1,000 shortfall, but simply rolling it rolling it over.
00:16:01
Speaker
So they threaten to terminate his contract. And then when he goes, well, I should probably talk to my lawyers about that, they immediately terminate the contract.
00:16:13
Speaker
Yes, I think it was sort of that they they wanted to terminate it on some grounds, and he said, no, i I'm pretty sure according to my contract you can't do that. I'm going to talk to my lawyer. And then they terminated it without really giving grounds, I think.
00:16:27
Speaker
it It possibly should be said, this is going to become apparent, I think, as we go through it. Mr Bates is a very detail-oriented person, hence his his ability to track down these these transactions and get into the nitty-gritty. And a very bloody minded person, again, as you can see, he's not going to he's not going to give in. He's not going to just take the word for it. He believes he knows what is right.
00:16:49
Speaker
And he's going to he's going to keep rolling that shortfall over until someone tells him how to do with it and some until tell them how to deal with it and and won't accept that it's his problem. Yeah, so he ends up going to his local MP to basically complain about his contract being terminated and the fact there seems to be a systemic error in the accounting software that the post office isn't willing to recognise.
00:17:13
Speaker
But by about 2004, which is five years after this error has occurred, nothing seems to be happening with the story.
Legal Actions and Settlements
00:17:23
Speaker
So he goes to a periodical, Computer Weekly, to see if they've got any information about what he could do, or whether they're willing to write a story on his particular issue. And over the next five years, as he's in communication with other sub-postmasters running other branches,
00:17:41
Speaker
they eventually get enough evidence to be able to publish the story, which appears in 2009. And that kind of ends up being the big thing that pushes this from a marginal story the post office is able to ignore to something which needs to be dealt with.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yes, because once the story gets out, I mean, as as as you say, a bunch of sub-postmasters had already been in touch to give their stories to Computer Weekly. And then once the story's published, a bunch more of them read the story and say, oh, gosh, OK, this thing that's been happening to me has been happening to other people as well.
00:18:14
Speaker
And so they form an organization, the Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance, and and use this organization to campaign on the behalf of these these sub-postmasters who have been the victim of these accounting errors.
00:18:26
Speaker
And they're big enough at this point that the post office has to take has to pay attention to them. So the post office sets up a mediation scheme in 2013 to deal with them, but then abandons it ah just before the release of a report into Horizon from the forensic accounting firm Second Sight. And so when this report comes out, it becomes clear why the post office had abandoned the mediation scheme, because it says that...
00:18:52
Speaker
While there were no system-wide problems with Horizon, it wasn't like sort of the the way the software worked was incorrect, there were little bugs in it, and they showed you know they were able to show and multiple cases that these bugs existed and that they could cause these false shortfalls to occur. And they were things like sort of you know weird race conditions where if you if you enter a transaction and then hit the enter key and then hit it again while that transaction is still processing, it would end up duplicating a transaction. Weird little sort of sort of edge cases like that.
00:19:25
Speaker
Yeah, so basically if you're trying to put in multiple transactions at a time because you're catching up with some work, you can end up duplicating transactions by simply doing what you think you should do, which is put in data, press enter, get in into the next cell but by that time the dup you've got a duplication in your form.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, so the various sort of, ah you know, they they were they were rare enough, you know, ones that occurred only occurred in specific circumstances so they weren't, it wasn't something that people were seeing every time which is why um they that they They could have been covered up up until this point. But but no more.
00:20:07
Speaker
Now that they have this information, now that now that this report has has shown that there are definitely individual bugs and that the post office presumably knows about it and that ah Fujitsu, the people who made Horizon, knew about it,
00:20:22
Speaker
Bates, at the head of the Justice for Sub-Postmasters Alliance, brought a group legal action against the post office. So this was the case Bates and others v Post Office Limited. And this case, this action was heard from 2017 to 2019. There is four-year gap there, so it takes time for this to get to court. Oh, yeah yeah, everything, anything to do with the the the legal system. it the The wheels turn slowly. But because it takes time for this to get to court, that's why you get this kind of compounding issue of the fact that there are people who have been charged with criminal activity or tarred with the association of being corrupt.
00:21:02
Speaker
So having to live through this before they can get their day in court to show that actually it's not them, it's the software. Yep. So by this stage, that that this this particular the group um that the that comprises Bates and others consists of 555 sub-postmasters by this stage. So you can see what a widespread problem it was.
00:21:25
Speaker
um Now, the the the action, there were planned to be four trials. The first one was was quite damning of the post office and its treatment of sub-postmasters. um Here's an article from Computer Weekly talking about it. They say...
00:21:41
Speaker
The Post Office later went on to make an application to appeal large parts of the first trial judgment, but the Court of Appeal rejected it. Lord Justice Colson and the Court of Appeal likened the treatment of sub-postmasters by the Post Office to the way Victorian factory owners treated their workers.
00:21:58
Speaker
So um definitely definitely not complementary toward the post office. But that was just the first one of four. However, before the judgment was returned for the second one, the post office agreed to settle.
00:22:12
Speaker
And ah as in the case of the mediation, it became fairly clear why, because once the judgment came out, it found that Horizon had known that there were bugs and that the post office assistant, to that Horizon was robust and that all the figures were correct and that any errors must have been the fault of the postmasters was a load of old bollocks.
00:22:33
Speaker
So the judgment here included, this approach by the post office has amounted in reality to bear assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred, at least so far as the witnesses called before me in the Horizon Issues trial are concerned.
00:22:46
Speaker
It amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat. Although I have to say the 21st equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat is still ah still maintaining that the Earth is flat. There are flat Earthers out there and they have YouTube channels.
00:23:00
Speaker
I've seen them. They have more subscribers than we do. Oh, yes, they do. Some of them. Yes, definitely. um But now you talked about how long it took for this this process to go through. At least some of that...
00:23:11
Speaker
was due to the fact that the post office, one of the things the post office was was criticised for was for dragging their heels, basically. They would take as long as they possibly could to to produce evidence that they'd been required to produce and when doing so would produce the absolute bare minimum of evidence that they were required and so then they'd have to ask for more evidence then they'd take as long as they possibly could.
00:23:33
Speaker
They were trying to draw it out, playing every every legal trick in the book, but it still not Yeah, running out of book, as they say. Yeah, so the 555 claimants were awarded £57 million, pounds which came down to £12 million pounds after all the legal costs were deducted, which um works out to over £200,000 per claimant, which is is not a small sum of money. But if we're talking about people who by this stage could have lost more than a decade's worth of income, of people who have been declared bankrupt and what have you, it's still it's not actually going to cover everything they lost.
00:24:10
Speaker
However, a condition of the settlement that they reached with the post office was that a compensation scheme be set up for all affected sub-postmasters, not just the 555 of them in group.
00:24:22
Speaker
that were were represented um in that group And um then, yeah, as you say, ITV had their miniseries, Mr. Bates versus the Post Office, Alan Bates, played by Toby Jones.
00:24:34
Speaker
um And so I gather this this was the first time, if if you hadn't been reading Computer Weekly or reading the news, um seeing dramatised, having it in your living room with human faces put on it was the first time many people had heard of this scandal, and this was, again, 2024, end of last year.
00:24:54
Speaker
A full 25 years after Horizon went in. And this basically caused public outrage, which then basically forced the British Parliament to go, actually, we need to do something about this. Apologies actually need to be made.
Inquiry and Human Impact
00:25:09
Speaker
Yes. Now, before that, though, um starting in 2020, there was an inquiry. ah that The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was started in 2020, chaired by Sir Wynne Williams.
00:25:22
Speaker
It started as a non-statutory inquiry, but then in 2021 was upgraded to a statutory inquiry, which, as I understand it, a a statutory inquiry is an inquiry with teeth, basically. It has actual legal hefts.
00:25:34
Speaker
and and can compel people to produce evidence or to show up and give witness testimony. So, you know, it showed they were they were taking it fairly seriously. um So, again, started in 2020, and as we said, the reason why were talking about this in the first place, the reason why I heard about it in the first way place, was because this week, in July of 2025, they released the first volume of their final report.
00:26:00
Speaker
There'd been ah an interim report already in 2023, but this is the start of the final report. there are there There are further volumes to come, but Sir Williams has said that he he wanted to get this part out as early as possible to focus on the victims. um In the introduction of the report, he says,
00:26:19
Speaker
from the moment of my appointment as chair of this inquiry i was always of the view that those who had been adversely affected by horizon should have a major role in the works of the inquiry that is why core participants who fell into that category were the first persons to be asked witness statements and called to give oral evidence that is why too i thought it appropriate that the recognised legal representatives of those core participants should have a significant role in all aspects of the inquiry I have formed, too, that the impact upon those affected, the human impact, should be placed at the forefront of my report to the Minister. That is why I have decided to publish this volume of my report as soon as it was completed, rather than wait for the whole of my report to be ready for publication.
00:26:58
Speaker
And indeed, a significant chunk of this report is the human impact section. have you Did you have a flip through the report? It's depressing reading. Briefly, but it is it it is incredibly depressing reading. Yes, I went i had to read through the human impact section. i mean Just to give you an idea of it, the the human impact section has the following subsections.
00:27:18
Speaker
Persons who died by suicide or attempted suicide or suffered significant ill health. Persons who are prosecuted. Persons who are suspended and or terminated or who resigned. Persons who suffered adverse financial consequences.
00:27:32
Speaker
Impacts on those who have made claims for financial redress. Impacts on the immediate family. And it has a bunch of case studies of individuals going through in detail everything that had happened to them and showing how their lives had been ruined by these prosecutions. There you know people people who were declared bankrupt, people who went to prison. Like you said, you know mr mr Bates was...
00:27:53
Speaker
Lucky enough that his the the the amount he was quibbling over was relatively small, but some of these people were accused of sort of several hundred thousand pounds worth of shortfalls, which meant some of them you know that that that resulted in prison times, it resulted in bankruptcies, it resulted in enormous mental stress. And 13 suicides.
00:28:14
Speaker
13, the report says at least 13 suicides can be linked to the scandal. One one of the case studies, obviously for privacy reasons, they didn't want to talk too much about that, but I'm assuming the family of one of these people consented or something, and so he is the number one, the the first in the section of case studies is...
00:28:33
Speaker
I didn't copy down the name, but it's it is is quite sobering to look at this thing and read the first one, which says, this man's name, mismanine brackets, deceased, and you know what you're in for.
00:28:44
Speaker
And so, yes, it is it is really, really quite harrowing and depressing reading going through, you know, because when you talk about 555 people or, almost people, its that's It's easy to think, well, that's just terrible, but then when you actually look at individuals and see everything that they went to, it really hammers home what an awful thing it was, and it really is extra damning on the post office that this is because of them, because they refused to acknowledge that these eras were real. Well, look, this on Peter on the Bush, Josh, they conspired They conspired. They were aware...
00:29:20
Speaker
That the Horizon software was buggy and that many of the cases where they had taken people to court was based upon not being willing to admit the software was buggy and prosecuting people for financial crimes they did not commit.
00:29:36
Speaker
Yes, I mean, that' yeah that that is why we are justified about in talking about it on this podcast, do because maybe not at the very beginning, but fairly early on, they knew that there were bugs, they knew that these shortfalls would be that they were blaming on Postmasters were at least in some cases being caused by bugs, and yet there was clearly an official policy that, no, the line the software is always right,
00:30:00
Speaker
ah The shortfalls are always genuine, the convictions are always justified. So there is very definitely a conspiracy going on to cover this up and to, to to I guess, limit the post office's liability in these things.
00:30:15
Speaker
I guess ah one one thing to mention... It's sort of presented as quite a shocking thing when they talk about it in um in in articles and stuff, that it's revealed that Fujitsu had this log of you know ah thousands of known issues, which again, as someone who works in software, all software has bugs that they know about. And in a very large software, it probably has a huge number of bugs because time is time is finite, resources are finite, you can only work on...
00:30:43
Speaker
So many bugs at a time. but So it's not that it's not that the software has bugs, it's that the the the presence of these bugs is hidden and denied, even when it's known that they're causing real problems in the real world.
00:30:57
Speaker
But as you say, 2024 is when the public at large really got got fully clued into this with the ITV miniseries. And so that's that's what spurred the government into action.
00:31:08
Speaker
um So President at the time, Rishi Sunak, how long was he? coming prime Prime Minister, not President. The UK has not quite gone back a Cromwell-like era.
00:31:20
Speaker
PM Rishi Sunak, during the, I i assume, 45-minute period during which he was prime minister before someone else came in, um announced two different acts. they It was sort of... It looked like... There's sort of one one act which says...
00:31:35
Speaker
this This is an act to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted. And then there's another act which sort of says, but that doesn't mean you can get away with fraud. I assume just on the off chance that people were like, you actually genuinely committed fraud and would then jump onto it and say, oh, yes, look what that nasty post office did to me, accusing me of all this fraud. So then there was sort of another act which is which was to say, but it is still possible to prosecute people if it is genuinely found that they are, did actually commit fraud. I believe...
00:32:02
Speaker
there are um there are There are multiple schemes, compensation schemes. There's sort of the one for the 555 people who were in that original case. There's a separate compensation scheme for people who were convicted and they had their convictions overturned.
00:32:17
Speaker
last, I heard about 100 convictions have been returned overturned as a result of Bates and others v Post Office Limited, but there are probably more to come. And then there's yet another kind um compensation scheme for people who weren't convicted but still suffered losses due to this. And I believe there's some – when you sign up for the compensation scheme, you have to sign a declaration that sort of, yes, I promise, pinky swear, I did not commit any fraud, just so that if it then turned out that they were able to prove you had actually committed fraud, you could still be prosecuted it again later or so some some something like that.
00:32:54
Speaker
And then the last the last part of it is that there is a criminal investigation into the post office. This is still ongoing, but they're investigating possible perjury and perverting the course of justice um in in that, presumably, I don't know details, but it must have happened in earlier cases or in in Bates and others v. Post Office Limited that people stood on the stand and said either...
00:33:19
Speaker
no, the software is robust, or ah no, we had no idea that these bugs existed, when in fact, neither of those was true. So people are looking to see if if if individuals can be held accountable for some of this that went on. But um that' will be that'll be an interesting one to see, given that, you know, will it be a case of of CEOs and higher-ups actually um being found guilty of stuff and suffering consequences, or will it or will it be some middle managers that they push out and go, oh, they're responsible. We at the top never know.
00:33:53
Speaker
Or will it be one of those sort of systemic failure things where where no one individual is um gets the blame and and and and at the end of it um they can't actually point the finger or press consequences onto any particular individual? Well, who knows? We'll have to see. It's ongoing.
00:34:11
Speaker
And as we have seen all the way through this, from a thing that started throwing problems 1999 and We're still seeing things happening in 2025. This ongoing investigation could take who knows how long.
00:34:25
Speaker
Well, yes, given how long it took for the first report to be issued, who knows how long would be for the final reports to come out. So yes, this was um this was quite an interesting thing. So i can I'm assuming that there are people in other parts of the world are considerably less ignorant of it than I was before I started looking into it. But um if you hadn't heard about the Horizon Post Office scandal, well, now you have.
00:34:52
Speaker
You have now. Yeah. So um i think I think that's about all there is to say for now. Maybe this is going to be yet another one of those things that we'll keep having news updates for as they as they dribble in over time. But those tend to disappear. Do you remember the – it was a Haiti, the president of Haiti got assassinated, and we kept saying – we spent years saying, hmm – Maybe here's a development. Maybe something's going to happen. And I think they identified some people and it just kind of went away.
00:35:22
Speaker
did they ever Did they ever find out who who exactly was responsible for, what was his name, Jamal Khachoggi? President of Haiti, assassination. Let's lift let's have a real time. Sure we do, yeah. Well, no.
00:35:37
Speaker
although I'm sure you'll edit out the real time this year because it's actually it's terrible. when we you the the Oh, let's let's do some internet searching. im Okay, i'm seeing I'm seeing one month ago there was a news article in the AP about him. Haiti's president was killed four years ago. The questions around his death remain unanswered.
00:35:56
Speaker
Well, at least it means that we're up with the play and that, like everyone else, we still don't know. Yes, the ah lawyer looking into it says, while international efforts have yielded some results, the quest for justice in Haiti remains elusive.
00:36:11
Speaker
Indeed. Also, that I think about it Jamal Khashoggi, I mean, there was pretty clearly the yeah the Saudis there, but aren't there? There's... News about him as well. So who knows?
00:36:23
Speaker
Who knows? Look at this. I know that was from a year ago. Saudi ambassador reveals new details. So who knows? that's that's That's what happens in these cases. They go on and they go on and they go on. And sometimes sometimes something happens and sometimes they just just drift away.
00:36:42
Speaker
Like Flight MH370, the case that will never be solved and the reason why this podcast will never die. It's true. It's why your children have to take on the legacy of doing this podcast after your death.
00:36:54
Speaker
Not my death, your death. Indeed. You know who won't never die Jeffrey Epstein. Because he did. I mean, yeah I mean, he has died. As far as you know. Well, he's probably, well, actually, ah I mean, if we get into the conspiracy theories about what happened to Epstein, then yes, there is the whole fake death conspiracy theory. There's got to one of them as well.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, we can talk about that after the break. Yes, so we're going to record a bonus episode for our bonus patrons in which we we have to mention the latest Epstein and um it's seen developments.
00:37:26
Speaker
But we also have now the um the the early July... involves two ah momentous anniversaries. Momentous events in human history. human history. One is the birth of the good Dr. Denteth.
00:37:41
Speaker
who so so it Let me say on the podcast, happy birthday, Dr. Denteth, for last week. Thank you. I feel old and cold. And then a couple of days after your birthday, of course, is the anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing.
00:37:54
Speaker
And this being 2025 and it happening in 1985, it is the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. And given that this podcast has been around for more than 10 years, which doesn't seem right, but is actually true, we covered it for the 30th anniversary. So we thought in our bonus episode, why don't we do a bit of a recap of the last time we talked about it?
00:38:15
Speaker
I mean, there there's there's no new information that's going the same story we told last time. There's bit. it's years later. It is ten years later. So, if you want to hear us talking about Epstein and a Greenpeace ship getting bombed, and you're a patron, good news, you're going And if you're not a patron, but you'd like to, then you can just just just be one.
00:38:36
Speaker
just Just go be one. Consider it a birthday gift. make Exactly. for Maybe for someone else. Maybe for yourself. Whenever your birthday happened to be, go to portrayon.com and search for the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. Everybody has a birthday. Everybody has a birthday.
00:38:51
Speaker
And everyone eventually gets a death day. And that's not a threat. That's a fact. good So, on that cheery note, I think we'll let you go for another week, and another fortnight, another whenever we record it. um Interestingly, I sort of thought this recording would be less bumpy than normal since we're in the same country. And actually it's been a lot worse than usual. I don't know if it's just because the service we used to record, we're now sending stuff from New Zealand to servers on the other side of the world and then back to New Zealand, which is no improvement. But anyway, we got there. We got there in the end. It all worked out.
00:39:26
Speaker
But yes, are there any awkward or long pauses? Either that's because Josh hasn't edited the podcast properly or Josh has deliberately put them in.
00:39:37
Speaker
Just so you know what we have to put up with. yep So until next time we talk to you, hopefully, and with with ah with a slightly more reliable internet connection, it just remains for me to say, conspiracy, see you later.
00:39:52
Speaker
I'm going to say, happy Death Day.
00:40:01
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy features Josh Addison and Associate Professor M.R. Extentis. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who is so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
00:40:15
Speaker
You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
00:40:42
Speaker
And remember, according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a stranger is just a friend you haven't met.