POL00069845
POL00069845
3 November 2006 Bond Pearce LLP
Ballard House
West Hoe Road
Plymouth PL1 3AE
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.
Greg Booth DX 825i Piymouth
Newby Post Office
401 Scalby Road stephen.dill
Scarborough Direct: f
YA12 6TQ Our ref:
S3D3/NJM1/348035.134
URGENT Your ref:
Dear Greg
Post Office Ltd v Lee Castleton
I refer to our recent telephone conversation.
In view of our conversation, we asked Fujitsu to review the occurrence you reported that had transpired.
Fujitsu have confirmed that:
1. It is part of the design of the Horizon system that a transaction is not written on to the system for
accounting purposes until the session is settled, at which point you have a set of transactions
including settlement which nets zero.
2. There is a recovery mechanism for banking and APS transactions, but for other types of
transactions, the Horizon User Guide explains that if the system crashes during a transaction, the
user has to re-enter the details.
3. Futjitsu have confirmed that the gateway at Newby was rebooted at about 1.25pm on Wednesday
25 October, possibly because the system froze when printing the receipts for a postage label and
that the label itself had been successfully printed at 1.17pm (value £1.27).
4. Accordingly, in your case, the postage label would have been on the stack, but the session was
never settled. This is not the case of the system “losing” a transaction that had been recorded.
Instead, as the session had not been settled when the computer froze, it was not recorded in the
first place.
As this is a small point, we are considering whether a supplemental statement is needed at all. However,
we have to have served all our witness statements on Mr Castleton’s solicitors by 10 November so given
the tight timescale, I enclose a supplemental draft witness statement for your approval just in case we
decide it is required. At the same time, I am sending this to Counsel for comment.
I will discuss this issue with Counsel on Monday and then give you a call to confirm whether the statement
is required and also to see if you have any amendments that you would like to make.
Kind regards.
Yours sincerely
Stephen Dilley
for and on behalf of Bond Pearce LLP
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