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IN THE CROWN COURT AT
STAFFORD T 2004/7026
REGINA
ad
CARL a“ PAGE
\
DERENCE Sf ATEMENT
SAHODd 28/y[O6 ;
/
Messrs. Frisby and Co.
Solicitors for the Defendant
26 Eastgate St
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IN THE CROWN COURT AT STAFFORD T 2004/7026
REGINA
and
CARL ADRIAN PAGE
DEFENCE STATEMENT
1. Mr. Page began working as a subpostmaster in February 1997 with his then wife
Deborah following 9 years service as a Royal Marine and a short spell working for
his then father-in-law. He had no relevant financial services or banking experience.
Mr. and Mrs. Page were given 2 weeks on the job training at Wolverhampton Post
Office and, having bought the right to run Rudgeley sub post office for £102,496,
were thereafter expected to manage what was in effect a combination of a small bank,
government office and shop in strict accordance with the Post Office’s internal rule
and regulations.
2. The Crown asserts that Mr. Page has stolen £282,000 from the Post Office. Curiously
the Post Office cannot say when the money was stolen, nor by what means, nor from
what account or fund within the sub post office. From January 1993 until July 2005,
when Mr. Page and a Midland’s businessman } } Were acquitted of
conspiracy to defraud the Post Office of £600,000, the Crown’s case generally was
that the money had come from the foreign exchange till. Having thought about it, and
having accepted the verdict of the jury, the Post Office now suggest that a separate
amount which is nothing to do with the £600,000 has been stolen by Mr. Page from
somewhere else in the office but hidden by some means in the foreign exchange
account using the Post Office’s Horizon computer system. However for reasons
identified by Mr. Timothy Taylor FCA in his expert’s report of April 2006 this is
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extremely unlikely because of what the Post Office itself found when it examined the
accounts for the 14" and 21" of August 2002.
3. It appears to be the case that the entire accounting system of the post office relies on
the accurate inputting of information by the on-site staff who send the weekly returns
off by post to various centres. Thus once an input error is made because of the way
the system works there is a serious danger of it being carried forward forever.
Although the indictment period runs from the 1“t March 2002 the Post Office does not
know whether the opening balances are correct and has no way of knowing what the
real as opposed to the imputed figures are or should have been. It is a significant
feature of the case that in the middle of the indictment period a Post Office audit team
went into Rudgeley, closed the office and audited the entire operation. They
concluded that the office was not well run but did not find evidence of theft or fraud.
4. Expert analysis of the accounts by independent consulting accountants, Messrs.
KPMG, support the criticisms made of the system. Without knowing how much
ought to have been in the system at the beginning of the period it is simply not
possible to say how much ought to have been in it at the end.
5. When Mr. Page was arrested in January 2003 the police conducted an exhaustive
enquiry into his finances. They were assisted in their task by the grant of freezing
and information orders by the High Court. The police were satisfied that there was no
evidence at all of high living or concealed assets. The Post Office do not and cannot
show that Mr. Page has had a penny of the money he has allegedly stolen.
6. Mr. Page was not dishonest but as the Post Office’s own records show he was neither
an efficient nor a competent post master. It also knew that for no apparent reason and
from a standing start Rudgeley sub post office, between January 2002 and January
2003, was the country’s leading sub post office bureaux de change. During that
period it sold, to one man, over 14 million euros: then worth nearly £9 million. The
Post Office, over the whole of the same period, failed to notice that anything out of
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the ordinary was happening or that it had made no profit at all out of these huge
transactions. Against this background of incompetence and ineptitude it is not
surprising that it was not the Post Office which alerted the authorities to worries about
money laundering but a wholly independent bank. Ironically even that turned out to
be wrong because as the police and the customs and excise satisfied themselves very
early on there was no money laundering involved at all. The Post Office assumed
that Mr. Page behaved dishonestly in relation to the foreign exchange and prosecuted
him for it but the jury would have nothing of it and he was acquitted by them.
7. During the course of each year Mr. Page was responsible for performing some 7,500
transactions for the Post Office as well as those connected with the retail sales within
the sub post office. In addition to an enormous volume of rules and regulations there
would be monthly initiatives and weekly mailings from the Post Office. Given the
time which has elapsed since the offences are alleged to have taken place, the
enormous volume of transactions over the period, the quantity of paperwork and the
complexity of the regulatory framework in place Mr. Page is now at some
disadvantage in attempting to answer the allegations made against him.
8. In summary the Post Office failed to train Mr. Page adequately or at all; failed to
supervise him; failed to pay any attention to the huge quantities of foreign exchange
which he was quite openly ordering; failed to notice that it was apparently making no
profit out of those dealings and failed to pay any attention to its own error notices
which showed that Mr. Page was not running the sub post office in the way in which
its own rules and regulations required. Its own systems were confused, bureaucratic
and confusing. The internal audit appeared to show that the Post Office itself did not
think that anything significant was amiss. Not only was Mr. Page not dishonest but
the Post Office’s systems are such that the Crown cannot show how much money
ought to have been in the various accounts at the beginning of the indictment period,
cannot show what money ought to have been in the accounts at the end, cannot show
when money was taken, cannot show from what account and cannot say how it was
actually taken. Finally, having failed to establish any of these crucial matters the
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Crown is bound to accept that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Page ever
had a penny of the £282,000 that he is now alleged to have stolen.
3 Paper Buildings
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26" April 2006 N.T.LEVISEUR