Reporting the Post Office Horizon IT Scandal
Former Subpostmaster Pete Murray and current Professor Richard Moorhead have both written two very different books relating to the Post Office scandal. They are out this week. The Making and Breaking of a Subpostmaster I first spoke to Pete Murray whilst the Bates v Post Office group litigation was active. Pete had taken on the Hope Farm Road branch in Great Sutton in 2014, a year after being made…
Eleanor Shaikh has lost her court bid to have a single line in a government email unredacted. The line related to a top secret Post Office report called Project Brisbane. The Post Office has maintained that Brisbane and everything related to it is legally privileged , which means it is exempt from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. The ruling means we may never find out what it contains. The…
Former Subpostmaster Lee Bowerman has announced his intention to pursue legal action over the financial compensation offer he has received through the Capture Redress Scheme. Writing to the Department of Business, Bowerman said it follows my complete loss of confidence in the fairness, transparency and integrity of the assessment process and a scheme which is not fit for purpose. The Capture…
Victims of the Post Office Scandal are being treated differently in Scotland to those in England and Wales. The revelation has come through the work of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, an advisory panel which has alerted the government to the Post Office scandal s own postcode lottery. Professor Chris Hodges, the chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, has written to Darren…
Two solicitors with very different roles in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal are being prosecuted by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and will face a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT). An SDT has the power to permanently remove an individual s right to practice as a solicitor and leverage unlimited fines. Jane MacLeod is former General Counsel at the Post Office, which meant she…
The Post Office has claimed it should not make public crucial documents written six years ago, partly on the grounds doing so could compromise the organisation s capacity to receive a fair trial, should it ever face criminal proceedings over the Horizon IT scandal. Project Brisbane is a top-secret exercise conducted in 2020 by the Post Office s then-lawyers Herbert Smith Freehills. It is legally…
The final report of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry has been delayed once more. Although no publication date was ever formally announced, the process is taking longer than anticipated, and participants have been told we are now highly unlikely to see the final report delivered to parliament before September this year. In early 2025 I was told by sources close to the Inquiry that the Chair, Sir…
On Thursday 2nd July I will be delivering my first (and so far only) public talk this year on the Post Office scandal. It will be at the Ropetackle Arts Theatre in Shoreham-by-Sea and I m very much looking forward to it. A lot has happened since we did that run of dates in 2024. I have written another book (the as-yet-unpublished The Great Post Office Cover-Up), which has given me a whole new…
The detectives running the investigation into possible criminal activity at the Post Office have indicated that former Post Office General Counsel, Jane MacLeod, is a significant individual to their criminal investigation. Operation Olympos is a long-running police investigation formed in the wake of the Bates v Post Office civil litigation. It used to be headed up by the Metropolitan Police, but…
I am once more grateful to Eleanor Shaikh and Matthew Somerville for bringing important information into the public domain. Matthew runs the Dracos Inquiry website which mirrors the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry website whilst making every document on it searchable. There is a manual element to Matthew s work, which involves scanning the Inquiry website for new uploads. Over the weekend Matthew…