Mr Bates

[tony]

Where did the money go?

[Stinsy]

I've been following the Post Office scandal for a while. Haven't see the recent ITV drama but I understand it completely ignored the current ITV CEO's role in the whole thing.

What a nasty bunch of power-hungry masochists the Post Office management were. It is clear they knew the decent ordinary folk they
persecuted and prosecuted were innocent and got personal gratification from destroying lives needlessly.

This series of Radio4 documentaries is worth a listen:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m000jf7j

[Yuff]

The whole thing stinks and what’s worse they are sitting on their fat arses doing bu**er all about it.
Did it really need a set of lawyers to tell the post office that suddenly 100s of postmasters thought they could steal £1000s and get away with, out of the blue…….
No doubt the cash went into the the big black hole that is the Royal Mail……..

[AE-NMidlands]

The whole thing stinks and what’s worse they are sitting on their fat arses doing bu**er all about it.
Did it really need a set of lawyers to tell the post office that suddenly 100s of postmasters thought they could steal £1000s and get away with, out of the blue…….
No doubt the cash went into the the big black hole that is the Royal Mail……..

No, it allegedly went into their "profit" box, which I presume then justified the top dogs' bonuses...

The whole thing is almost as sick as the shower in Westminster still dragging their feet and delaying payments to the people who were given a death sentence from contaminated blood.

In this country the ruling class never really get held to account, at least in the USA they jail fraudsters. Here they are mostly establishment insiders and seem to live charmed lives.

p.s. and, now that I have had some home-brew wine with my tea, I will go further to reveal my real feelings and say that I think they are a completely despicable bunch of sh1ts, always with an ulterior motive. "Curtail public spending and reduce taxes" - except that for most people tax is going up relentlessly as a result of frozen allowances, and yet they continue to shell out obscene amounts of money to "consultants" - who are mostly providing fig leaves and steering them into a vaguely defensible way of feathering their own nests.

[tony]

It is remarkable to know where it went! We also know where it came from. In my simplistic way of looking at it the accounts should be able to figure out what was going on —- YEARS AGO

[Thebeeman]

Why did it take a TV programme to shame our Government into action? This has gone on under Labour, Coalition and Tory regimes and they all accepted "Nothing To See Here" from the P.O. They need to pin down who knew what and when and reclaim the compensation from Jujitsu if possible rather than us but if the P.O. was told early on and told them continue we will have to pick up the bill. I think we are now living in a 'banana republic'.

[Stinsy]

Why did it take a TV programme to shame our Government into action? This has gone on under Labour, Coalition and Tory regimes and they all accepted "Nothing To See Here" from the P.O. They need to pin down who knew what and when and reclaim the compensation from Jujitsu if possible rather than us but if the P.O. was told early on and told them continue we will have to pick up the bill. I think we are now living in a 'banana republic'.

The Radio4 series I linked to above put all the nasty detail in the public domain very clearly. However the result was no action. A prime time drama suddenly brings it all to the top of every politician's agenda.

I heard Kier Starmer trying to use the issue to score political points this morning. Which is particularly objectionable seeing as Horizon was rolled out in 1999 and the entire scandal occurred under a Labour government (sure the Tories and coalition weren't in a big rush to fix it).

[Thebeeman]

Our view is the a very large section of the UK public are living in a cosy bubble, don't listen to a voice radio station, get their news via social media etc. May the Lord help this country. We're glad to be 73 and not 23 at present, with luck we won't see the results.

[Kommando]

Any unaccounted surpluses were put into a suspense account. In accountancy terms this is unaccounted for money and assumed not to exist and so does not appear on the Profit and Loss account at the end of the year. This is good practice as it could be there because say a supplier was not paid. Forensic accountants are then set on the task of finding out where it came from. However in the PO there was a set period of time that after which if it was still in suspense and unclaimed then it just got carried over into the account's regardless of whether it had looked at. This was at a £ for £ rate so all eventually got declared as profit if it stayed in suspense long enough.

[Stinsy]

It’d be nice to see some “false accounting” convictions for the FD and other senior leadership of the Post Office.