So we did the research (read a lot of online sources and the fine print of the rental agreements) and decided that we wanted to go with a PO Box at the Post Office. That left us with two options, PO Box or UPS Mailbox? Our day jobs are on Fayetteville street in downtown Raleigh so we wanted a 'permanent' address we could walk to, so that checking it wasn't inconvenient. Most importantly, a place that people could send us notes of encouragement! (sadly, this hasn't come up either - but you could change that!!).Having an address listed on your website makes it seem more legit.With our crazy lives, things sent to our houses might get overlooked.

With all the paperwork involved in starting a company, we wanted to keep track of which address we submitted things under.Having a place that customers could return items (thankfully this hasn't come up yet).Privacy (not having to use our personal addresses).He replied that when he arrived at the Post Office he would have “read it and put it to one side … I cannot recollect taking any further action in relation to this document.Soon after starting UPstudio we realized that a permanent address would really help us for a few reasons: Wyn Williams, the retired judge heading the inquiry, asked Aujard what had happened to the draft report. “My view at the time was that given it was marked as a draft document and heavily caveated … it was something that would have required investigation in due course,” Aujard told the hearing. “Did it require immediate attention or not?” Page asked. He added: “It is a draft report that is heavily caveated and would at some point in the future had I been a permanent general counsel and stayed in the role … it would require further investigation to understand what had gone on historically in that team.” We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. skip past newsletter promotionĮnter your email address Sign up Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Page then asked: “This was telling you, was it not, that there were serious concerns over past prosecutions, wasn’t it?”Īujard replied he had “no specific recollection of what I thought of the document at the time” although he believed he would have asked questions about why the Second Sight report had been commissioned and whether it was an attempt to remove certain individuals from the investigation team. He responded: “This is a specific case of a specific team allegedly behaving in a certain way … and I do agree, this reads as though that team is adopting an adversarial approach to their investigation.” It is that group … who really have become enemies of the business.”įlora Page, a barrister acting for a number of victims of the scandal, put to Aujard that the report showed “needless adversarialism” by the Post Office’s investigation team. By failing to investigate those assertions (or even to pay proper heed to them during interviews) the investigators have alienated all of them. The draft report said: “It is the handling of this group that seems to have been seriously flawed. It found certain post office operators “passionately believed” they were innocent. The Second Sight report said the culture within the Post Office investigation team “appears to be one of a ‘presumption of guilt’ when conducting an investigation, rather than one of ‘seeking the truth’”.

The ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office put the injustice in the spotlight earlier this year, prompting calls for ministers to address the scandal more speedily amid claims that they had sought to delay compensation payments to victims.Ĭhris Aujard, a former senior lawyer at the Post Office, was asked at the public inquiry in London on Thursday why he had taken no action when handed a draft report by Second Sight after he joined the Post Office as interim general counsel in October 2013. Hundreds of people running UK post offices were wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting and had their lives ruined in what has been described as the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history.

Post office po box