Post Office inquiry: ex-Fujitsu boss grilled over failure to notice system errors 

How about bringing charges against all of the previous CEO's Venells wasn't in charge when most of the prosecutions were made she merely continued the stablished line.

@@duncbee she was in charge for a lot of them and aided the cover up

I agree. There is now enough prima facie evidence of wrongdoing against many people for police investigations to begin. Fujitsu started working with ICL in the eighties and later acquired the company and continued to employ former ICL software engineers. Working for client companies, my professional experience of ICL software is that rarely was it commercially released without a host of "undocumented features", many of them serious in nature. Many, many other people involved in the installation of ICL software at the time would say the same. Royal Mail / Post Office cannot have been unaware of ICL's track record when the contract was placed and there would seem to have been a glaring lack of due diligence leading up to it with, of course, tragic consequences.

@@anonnemo2504 A lot of the comments have blamed the Tories for the Post office shambles. It was actually Labour under Tony Benn that pushed ICL/Fujitsu onto the Post Office.

Can matters not be speeded up with investigations starting? This will go on forever and the culprits may never be brought to justice. Surely there is more than enough evidence

Yes, excruciating

As large corporations go are they the outliers or the norm?

Yes he was a horrible self opinionated old man who constantly interrupted and went on and on with stuff he hadn’t been asked about. So condescending. Tampered is exactly the right word.

Yes it was so refreshing to hear real Truth , and easy to hear , not stressful at all.

JAIL TIME!!!!!!!!

the 2 , 2nd sight guys were superheroes ( without capes) I was proud of my profession ( Accountants)

@@Pat14922 and rightly so. They gave really brilliant testimony. And they did excellent work.

And he gets paid millions a year! I wouldn't have employed him as a clerk!

This is pretty standard to be fair

Just what I said about Paula Vennells.

_All_ of the executives and upper management at POL and Fujitsu seemed to have _no_ curiosity about anything (well, except about the level of their bonuses maybe...).

@@CatholicSatan That’s not how our system works. If you are a small business trading fraudulently you are more likely to be fined or jailed than a large business. No UK directors were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crash. Jes Stanley of Barclays was fined and banned for his later fraudulent conduct. Executives of other household names including HSBC, Tesco, SportsDirect have all escaped penalty. This is just how our system works.

virtually none of these PO and Fujitsu 'managers' would I ever employ...

Of the big 8 banks who promoted the great recession in 2008. Every one of them fired or demoted their RISK MANAGERS. ALL 8.

It's all about the 'brand' and PR, never about integrity.

Exactly like all the disgusting cronies in the Tory government, shady, incompetent, unrepentant, arrogant and with no concerns about any accountability.

He had sensed which way this is headed and has covered his backside without commitment.

Fushitsu! Amazing! 😂

CONsultancies. The clue is in the name.

We have a little Shi Tzu. At least she knows when she messed up.

He’s playing at being a bone head because he prefers that to conspiracy to get innocent people bankrupted and locked up.

UK Tory governments specialize in three things: dumb things like that; never doing anything conservative; ignoring their own voters.

The Labour Bristol council recently approved a contract with Fujitsu.

The name "Fujitsu" is misleading. The company in question was ICL, formerly the blue-eyed boy of British mainframe computing, which was about to become insolvent before Fujitsu was persuaded to buy it. There must have been a secret undertaking by the government that they would continue to be the preferred provider when it came to public sector contracts.

@@faithlesshound5621 Fujitsu was the main shareholder, about 80% of ICL, before it was renamed. Also as a Japanese company, Blair was threatened by the Japanese government to pull future Japanese investment in the UK (ie destroying jobs) if the government stopped supporting Fujitsu. The corruption goes to the highest level.

@@mollienight It's not just Fujitsu. Public sector contracts for computing routinely take several years longer to finish and cost several times the original forecast.

Japanese companies may struggle to accept liability or show remorse or flag errors due to cultural reasons and to avoid having to interact with regulators they grew up and went to school with. And generally non-Japanese executives have to follow the same approach to keep their jobs and to keep Japan happy. The UK Govt officials that send contracts to Japanese companies know this and are aware of the risks this presents to material supply contacts paid for by the taxpayer. These risks can be mitigated through effective procurement and oversight practices, like those the FCA requires of the firms it regulates.

This enquiry has been one very high paid person after another saying they didn't know. Unbelievable.

@@joemander7580 Being questioned by a highly paid person. These investigations are a waste of taxpayer money.

he was completely demolished...he started out arrogant..ended up a jello. the barristers did a good job

@@daydays12 I hate the clasped hands moving around , all scripted , their like sheep being told how to be behave , disgusting .

@@lindahaynes3475 Agreed 😞

There are some Capture cases that went to prosecution of several subpostmasters that need to be included in this inquiry, I hope that they are.

Shame on this despicable woman

I don't suppose she recalls sending that memo.

@@RGP_Maths I'm not sure... I dont remember...

This is an enquiry, not a criminal trial (hopefully that will come later, but soon). The questioning at the enquiry is letting the witnesses hang themselves with their replies. All of the questioning can be used in the criminal case (hopefully by the Met Police, but if not then a private prosecution funded by the public). The barristers are doing a sterling job revealing the truth of the matters. The criminal case(s) will provide the entertainment... the enquiry is the building block for this.

The judicial system can only judge what is put in front of it. In the case of the SPM prosecution the POL and Fujitsu lied or hid information that cast doubt on the guilt of SPMs would probably have resulted in different judgements

The Judicial System operates on the basis that all participants are operating with integrity - and there are sets of rules that define this. The Post Office was (and still is) in the almost unique position of conducting its own criminal prosecutions, which I believe is the fundamental reason for this scandal and the removal of that power is one of the conclusions I expect to result. It won't, on its own, eliminate such biased and fraudulent prosecutions (in-house lawyers could still withold essential info) but will provide a valuable 'barrier' that does seem to work for other large organisations.

Disclosure in the Misra case would probably have ended prosecutions in 2010.

yes it seems the judges were complicit in all this

And the Post Office , no more cards , need to be Ecards .

I am now boycotting Poo-Jitsu.

Oh come now, surely you don't think that all theses lying sacks of Sh...... will not get their just deserts. Truth is in the corporate world they are all heros, lying when they can get away with it, forgetting facts when they cant. Just the qualifications needed to be snapped up by the next multinational looking for a senior executive that will protect the company no matter what when the next scandal hits.

HSE

Who??appointed them?

He doesn't really care as he knows nothing will happen and the media will move on to the next distraction that makes them money.

@@IbnBahtuta cynical but true 😞

@@daydays12 Factual and true, stop being so cynical. rofl

@@IbnBahtuta I wasn't being cynical . I thought you were..but what you wrote is, sadly, true, and I agree with you 100% These long 'inquiries' which never take action. The incompetence, callousness and self serving we see from these witnesses is truly disgusting. I wouldn't have employed 98% of them. ( exception one or two PO and the Second Sight Duo) The fact that virtually nothing will happen to them, and that they'll hang on to the money is sickening

@@daydays12 What we have seen is exactly what I expect to see in a profoundly sick society. I am not cynical at all, I'm just an observer here in the mouth of the lion stating what I have observed. When dealing with the Kafirun cynicism isn't part of the process, rather we are actually feeling really sorry for your self-inflicted predicaments that you react to time after time, never realising the actual cause of your predicaments. You could for instance consider your latest christian against christian war in Eastern Europe. Or the culpability the west has in the deliberately funded and assisted genocide of my brothers, sisters, children, and babies some of whom were only hours old when your taxes murdered them. But that's for another day called. Yawm al-Qiyamah

There's no arguing with a fat backhander full of yen/rubles/dollars/pounds.

Hmrc😢

@@hpoonis2010 The biggest backhander is labelled "dividends" and goes straight to the PM's family.

I also see Vennells and Tait displaying remarkable amounts of malice.

I worked for ICL/Fujitsu for over 25 years on similar projects (but not in Retail). Used similar systems. We employed the top programmers in their specialist field (costing MUCH more than my manager salary), bugs in the software were eliminated (none of the highest categories of failures would be delivered to the customer), all changes to the software could be traced to specific programmers etc etc. Out of billions of transactions, not one was lost (though we had some heart-stopping moments.....) We worked very hard to eliminate all avenues of failure across the system: failures in communications, in equipment, human interaction etc. I analysed the sources of risk to the project. The highest risk: "political". Once a project gets mentioned in parliament, you're as good as 'dead'! (that's not to say I did anything specific to avoid this, other than to have a clean system that behaved itself). The main category of risk was "doing something for the first time": we had plenty of those..... We even made sure that everything we connected to was in time-synch with the Rugby (caesium) clock, so that time stamps were accurate. The amount of 'fool-proofing' and redundancy was insane: but worth the cost. I've watched the Post Office scandal with particular interest. I keep coming back to the in-house (ICL/Fujitsu) error reports: where were they? With all that back-up of error reporting databases, why have we never seen them? Didn't the first legal cases require their discovery?

@@colinbell8231 Thanks. That is interesting. Much of my experience with ICL software WAS in retail applications, predominantly POS (point of sale) systems. Fortunately, never in the Post Office but with companies more trusting of its users, who were always employees, and never with a contractual relationship similar to that between Royal Mail / Post Office and sub-postmasters and mistresses. Other suppliers I dealt with included Unisys and Data General and all of them, in my experience, provided systems, of all kinds, with far fewer "undocumented features" than some of those supplied by ICL. Strangely, though, after a company I worked decided to install ICL's "OfficePower" system in the late eighties, it performed rather well. How much of its coding, however, was created by ICL, I never discovered and nobody from ICL seemed to want to discuss the matter. ICL hardware, mainframe, DRS 300, DRS 500 I found to be robust (a term more applicable to hardware than software, I always thought). On these, however, in house programmers would develop, test and maintain applications. My point, though, in a nutshell, is that Royal Mail / Post Office should have been aware of problems with ICL supplied POS systems but seem not to have carried out adequate technical due diligence at all stages of the development of "Horizon, both pre and post-internet.

I agree with what you say having been there myself, but the problem with this lot there seems to be a common thread of deceit, memory loss, arrogance and incompetence running through the whole debacle.

I agree there are a lot of people involved here that had a motive one way or another not to ask the right questions. A phrase I've heard a few times throughout the inquiry that I have added to my own vocabulary is "a lack of curiosity". I could understand that someone can't remember things happening many years ago and cannot speak directly to a specific event, but surely they would know themselves well enough to explain how they would have reacted to the event unfolding and any action then taken as a matter of course

Doing that (useless options) is enforced by management. But the option discussed was obviously actually considered. I really doubt those options actually came from the grunts.

@@lawr66 At one point he did say he was only following orders.

The inquiry is taking too long but, with KCs etc. paid by the hour, this was always going to be the case and often, when justice is delayed, justice is denied. Make no mistake, there are plenty of people deserving blame here.

It just seems there is no deterrent. No means to charge individuals so they just beat around the bush with their answers. And of course are so sorry it happened. Ironic

Pray for justice ⚖️ 🙏 I'm so sorry 😞