>>PO now admits blame...
It seems far easier to prosecute the "little people" who have limited resources to fight their corner.
I understand that the Post Office actually ran the prosecutions (perhaps our resident legal experts can confirm if I have this right). So it seems they were accuser and prosecutor.
As to the number of prosecutions not ringing alarm bells. I wonder if management at the Post Office thought, wow, Horizon is amazing, it's finding all these frauds that we didn't know about, rather than thinking, oh, there might be a lot of false positives here.
I have had fraud cases with my job at work, where directors of a business clearly manipulate and lie to gain financial advantage. We report each one. There has never been a prosecution on my or my other members of my team's portfolios.
The biggest was a company that clearly defrauded the NHS out of millions. Basically some medicines needed to be "hand made to order". Not particularly complex stuff.
The manufacturer would charge the pharmacy say £1,000 for the medicine. The pharmacy would charge the NHS £1,100. The manufacturer would then refund £900 to the pharmacy who would then pay £500 to the manufacturer (sharing the gain). I.e. the medicine should have cost say £100.
We notified the authorities. Presented the evidence but nothing happened. We immediately recalled all loans and put the manufacturer in to administration. The manufacturing side was purchased by a medicines conglomerate.
(BTW all fraud cases are checked by a team of retired detectives to ensure we have got it right.)
Last edited by: zippy on Fri 13 Aug 21 at 20:28
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