Guardian opinion piece on the UK #post#office scandal, by Marina Hyde https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/18/post-office-scandal-cover-up-justice?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
'in which totally innocent subpostmasters, the very backbone of villages and communities, were turned into criminals to cover up the fact that the Post Office’s Horizon computer system didn’t work properly. Each was told by the #PostOffice that no one else had any problems with the system. Vast sums were effectively looted from them to make up accounting shortfalls, before they were prosecuted anyway'
'new revelations, like the discovery of a document proving that #Post#Office investigators were ordered to group suspected subpostmasters in racial categories such as “negroid types” and “dark-skinned European types”. This advice was still in use in 2011. That document was also somehow not put before the inquiry, would you believe, along with tens of thousands of others the Post Office has been accused of serially withholding'
'Distraught subpostmasters were imprisoned pregnant, or still in their teens, or on their young child’s birthday, or in their old age, or in high-security jails where they saw and suffered terrible things. At least 60 have died without seeing justice or compensation; at least four took their own lives. Countless victims were driven into physical and mental problems from which they have never recovered.'
@fulelo It's quite astonishing that people were using such terms and grouping people in that manner in the 21st century. Not so surprising that they tried to hide their nasty behavior.
'the case of Francis Duff, an 81-year-old former subpostmaster who lost his house, business and marriage in the two-decade wait to be absolved and compensated. He was finally awarded £340,000 last October – only for the Post Office to immediately swoop and tell him he would lose £332,000 of it to cover income tax and the bankruptcy their own erroneous actions had forced him into. He couldn’t afford to heat his home last winter'
@fulelo as an outsider and software engineer watching this unfold it was obvious in the early stages that so many could not have been fraudulent and that it was a systemic issue, almost certainly buggy software. Not least because many of the claims made about the software by management and supplier were obviously ridiculous.
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