@Anthony Dixon:8 January 2024 3:52pm:
Thus speaks I should have thought, a pompous Accountant?
Accountants have indeed had criminal liability imposed as can be seen from cases as far back as The Hatry Group (Charles Hatry) through McKesson & Robbins (PW) to Barings, Northern Rock, Patisserie Valerie and Carillion (not leaving out 20 plus scandals in the 2000s in addition).
The last I heard Anthony Dixon was the prisons were crammed full of Accountants...
Anyone who has watched the proceedings of the Inquiry would be surprised that the test for regulatory consideration must await the eventual outcome which could be years away. Additionally there have already been court proceedings concluded.
The Profession should urge Parliament to enable it to go back to regulating itself as the delay in considering whether professional conduct has been infringed is damaging to all its members.
Of course the only thing here not discussed is the pressure brought on the POs lawyers from Executive Level. Will Vennells and the Company Secretary be giving evidence?
What would happen if any of the sometimes sententious contributors on here who actually are qualified - many seem not to be - were lawyers who refused to do their employers
work?
Accountants can be held liable for professional misconduct falling short of criminal liability where there have been financial or corporate failings. Being named is often a sanction most professionals would choose to avoid. SRA investigations should follow as a matter of course, where there has been a failure in our justice system - especially when there has already been criticism by at least one judge involved.
Anon 2.05p.m.
I don't think anyone here ius suggesting that the solicitors and barristers involved do not get a fair trial from either the SDT or from any criminal Courts nor that proper due process should take place with all the checks and balances put in place.
I would hope that would go without saying.
I think what people are saying is that even with what we know now a process should begin sooner rather than later but most people feel that unfortunately it will be the latter if at all which will bring shame on the profession and make the public think even less of us than they do now.
Nobody with any sense is interested in a witch hunt but we are interested in people being accountable.
Based on 20 years litigation experience there is no way this got where it did without solicitors and barristers actively turning a blind eye due to an entire lack of honesty and integrity and being in plain breach of the rules of professional conduct. They should be banned from the profession; jailed and financially stripped of all fees earned in the case, being proceeds of crime.
Howard @1.10.
The issue of the Code of Conduct and solicitor’s duty to the client (Post Office) are just part of the picture. As soon as they act as Prosecutors another set of obligations kick in. I mention just two: disclosure and weighing the realistic prospects of success of each individual case.
What has puzzled me so far, in the absence of information on the point is this. These prosecutions involved missing money based on the Post Office computer evidence. If the suspect represented by a solicitor denies taking the money the issue becomes simply the reliability of the computer evidence. That issue being raised and the PO as prosecutors refusing the address it I would expect an application to the court for the funding of expert reports. Presumably, either no such application was made or if so, they were refused. In the light of this how did the defence run the ensuing trials? Advising the client to plead guilty in the face of clear denials is obviously not the way. I am intrigued how these trials were run.
Solicitors are regularly struck off for "bringing the profession into disrepute" or "undermining public confidence" in the profession, even if they have not been convicted of committing a criminal offence .
So why has the SRA been so slow in dealing with the many solicitors whose concealments, non-disclosures, and other misbehaviours have contributed to this massive miscarriage of justice?
We will get to the end of the enquiry, and possibly then the SRA will start its process, and 20 years after the scandal began they will strike off a few low level people.
SRA - get your skates on and start now.
I suspect no one will be held to account at the end of the day. There appears to be no accountability for activities of this type in the country today. Our politicians have mostly turned a blind eye to the scandal until ITV have touched a nerve in the nation with a brilliant programme. All of a sudden, politicians are falling over themselves to say something must be done. The public enquiry isn't even going to report until the end of the year- why does it need another 11 months?
Sorry Howard but i think you are wrong.
You do not slavishly follow clients instructions regardless.
Your duty to the Court outweighs any duty to any client regardless of who that may be and even if we only consider what we know so far it cannot in any way be said that there was not at the very best misleading going on and at the very worse a lot more than that.
For example failing to disclose documents is a duty to the court not a matter of instructions.
The obligations of the lawyers seem to me to be pretty clear. They were employed lawyers and they had a duty as employees and as lawyers to act in their client's best interest but only insofar as in acting they did not do anything unlawful (an obligation placed upon all employees) or in breach of the code of Conduct. (an obligation placed upon them by their profession.)
If there was a conflict the solicitors duty to the court and to the rule of law supersedes that of his duty to the employer. If the lawyers breached the rules then they deserve what is coming to them. We are accountable for what we do and rightly so.
I can think of a number of things they MIGHT have done which will result in some kind of legal or professional consequence. We have yet to find out whether they HAVE done those things and doubtless the enquiry will eventually tell us.
I can see a situation however, where they have acted perfectly properly and carried out their legal and professional duties flawlessly but where the "bar of public opinion" want their blood.
I want to know the truth too what I do not want to see is more lawyers thrown to the wolves for simply doing their job.
@Michael Levi, you haven't read much about the evidence adduced during the inquiry, have you?
Amongst other things, there is written evidence (by way of emails) that the internal prosecuting lawyers were aware of the shortcomings of Horizon, failed in their disclosure obligations (choosing not to disclose evidence that harmed the PO's case or helped that of the defendant), and had an attitude of wanting to 'win' at any cost.
Unfortunately, in the absence of emails and internal notes to the contrary, it is not obvious what the internal PO lawyers should be accountable for. the failure of imagination about overall rates of offending by postmasters - among the most respectable sectors of our society - can easily be the product of individual case mindsets. Hence the popularity after WW2 of Germans who declared 'ich habe nicht gewusst' - i never knew [what was going on]. Can they be disciplined for not thinking? The investigators who lied (because they individually knew otherwise) when they asked suspects why theirs was the only case are in a different position, as are lawyers who knew there were lots of cases but claimed in court that there were not a lot of other cases.
"Unless a solicitor knowingly connived in an unfounded prosecution, why should there be any professional conduct consequences?"
Because any prosecutor (or prosecutor's solicitor) owes a duty of candour: see R (Kay) v Leeds Mags Court. The test is therefore not whether a solicitor "knowingly connived in an unfounded prosecution".
In his submission to the Horizon Post Office IT Inquiry Richard Moorhead, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics, University of Exeter, which he based on the work of the team researching the Post Office Scandal at Exeter’s Evidence Based Justice Data Lab , with Dr. Rebecca Helm (Exeter) and Dr. Karen Nokes (UCL) makes three points. The first (reinforced by his subsequent points and his general argument) is simply this:
“…Legal work, including legal work on civil shortfall cases and prosecutions
are central not tangential to the case. Legal work is the mechanism through which the victims of Horizon were harmed. And the mechanism by which justice has been delayed and denied.”
For the sake of the legal profession those that turned a blind eye or didn't raise their nagging concerns need to be hounded through the streets and cast out. However in clearing shop care needs to be taken that there are not further injustices for the purposes of pure vengeance. As mentioned no one question whether the scale of the fraud was credible which is surely question one
The Post Office's website makes the point that the Post Office has not brought any private prosecutions since 2015 - but from 1999 (when Horizon was introduced) until 2015 - they did - and serious miscarriages of justice ensued. It seems that the power for the Post Office to bring private prosecutions should be removed and all allegations only processed by established law enforcement agencies.
I would say this country is actually very poor at cover ups; we’re all aware of countless scandals (though I suppose there may be others we aren’t aware of if we are good at it). What we are great at is fostering extreme political apathy for action following these scandals, unless the victims are fortunate enough to eventually have an ITV Drama made about them. Notably we’ve all been incensed about this for months or years; the wider British public could have been aware too, they just didn’t care less because they didn’t want to know.
'If I have expensive enough lawyers and the pockets deep enough to pay them, I can say what I like and I can do what I like and throw my weight around because might is right.'
Is anyone ever going to admit to saying that, or be proven to have done so?
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