X Marks The Spot?

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Yesterday at the Post Office Scandal Inquiry, the former Chief Financial Officer, Alasdair Cameron, gave further evidence that Post Office Limited simply gave up trying to recover shortfalls from Sub-Postmasters and just wrote them off in the profit and loss accounts. Cameron told the inquiry:


“ …[POL was] bust. It’s been bust for years. It has £700m of net liabilities and we’ve disclosed this in excruciating detail for ARA [Annual Report and Accounts] after ARA…you could see the scale of that very quickly through the P&L, and it had been, I think, £2m a year when I joined, it went up to £5m a year, and suddenly it was £12m a year – it was a million pounds a month!”


Unpacking that: ultimately a million pounds a month was being written off, effectively as bad debt; where in reality, only a small proportion of those losses actually existed: the majority of the shortfalls having been created by the faulty software itself. Surely these “missing” funds should have shown as surpluses in cash at bank? Or was the entire accounting backend inextricably linked to and dependent on the faulty IT itself? Is there no physical paper trail? If not, how did POL’s accounting survive audit scrutiny for so many years? This simple matter of fact begs so many questions as to be central to any real understanding of the scandal itself. What was the ultimate destination of that million pounds a month? Who buried it and where?


As to the ultimate culpability or outright criminal guilt of agents within either POL or within its many support and supply systems, in the form of either direct employees or third-party subcontractors; at the very best, the organisation was in breach of company accounting law, ironically through false accounting; at worst it was, in whole or in part, involved in a conspiracy to defraud, and pervert the cause of justice in covering up that fraud. Simply put, the company either lost or actively stole the written-off ‘surpluses’ generated by its faulty software. That the faults with both Horizon and its predecessor and successor systems have been demonstrated to have been known by those within the higher echelons of POL, suggests strongly that an active conspiracy was indeed in operation.

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