I think you are confusing the actions taken by PEOPLE leading to the commercial liability of the post office. The civil action was against the PO the company. Nobody is trying to "Pierce the corporate veil" yet and hold director personally accountable for damages. That does not mean the PEOPLE are not criminally or even civilly accountable for their actions. If individuals are found to have done wrong, the board will not stand by them otherwise the wrong doing falls on them. The individual only has a defence to his/her wrong doing if he can show he was under orders and where those order came from.
I sought clarity on the legal position of people concerned with the cover-up and the company responsibility in the subsequent years of denying Alan Bates a fair hearing when the truth began to emerge about Horizon's role in all of this...
During the Obama years, the American left has regularly and forcefully claimed that "corporations are not people." Progressives ranging from ordinary protestors all the way up to President Obama have insisted that, because corporations are not living, breathing human beings, corporate personhood — the idea that corporations have certain legal and constitutional rights — is a fiction. As they would have it, corporate personhood was foisted upon the country by the radical conservatives of the Roberts Court and Republican officeholders with only one thing in mind: helping big business.
This is not to say that corporate rights operate in the same way as do the rights of natural persons. In many cases the law justifiably treats the rights of natural persons and artificial persons differently. It is to say, however, that respect for the rights of corporations, no less than respect for the rights of individuals, is advantageous for our social order and has been essential to America's development as a prosperous, free, and good society. Accordingly, America's perpetuation as such a society requires that we understand and defend corporate personhood and corporate rights against this criticism from the left.
The idea that corporations have legal rights, and therefore a kind of personhood, is not an invention of contemporary conservatives. Its roots stretch all the way back through the history of American law and deep into the English common-law tradition. That tradition was captured most comprehensively — and communicated to the American founders most forcefully — by William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England. The very table of contents of that work bears witness to the legal tradition of granting rights to corporate persons. Chapter 18, "Of Corporations," is placed in "Book the First: The Rights of Persons."
National Affairs.com
This is the first practical guide for every citizen on the problem of corporate personhood and the tools we have to overturn it. Jeff Clements explains why the Citizen's United case is the final win in a campaign for corporate domination of the state that began in the 1970s under Richard Nixon. More than this, Clements shows how unfettered corporate rights will impact public health, energy policy, the environment, and the justice system. Where Thom Hartmann's Unequal Protection provides a much-needed detailed legal history of corporate personhood, Corporations Are Not People answers the reader's question: "What does Citizens United mean to me?" And, even more important, it provides a solution: a Constitutional amendment, included in the book, which would reverse Citizens United. The book's ultimate goal is to give every citizen the tools and talking points to overturn corporate personhood state by state, community by community with petitions, house party kits, draft letters, shareholder resolutions, and much more.
Since the Post Office was changed from a statutory corporation to a public company, Royal Mail Group, in 2001, Post Office Counters Limited became Post Office Limited. After Richard Sweetman stepped down in 2001 and David Mills was appointed as Chief Executive of Post Office Limited, a newly created role, then in 2006 Alan Cook, was appointed with the title Managing Director. In 2010, David Smith took over the role of Managing Director before Paula Vennells took the poisoned chalice and drank deep in the conspiracy bequeathed by her predecessors.
All of them bear responsibility for the Post Office's denial during the first decade before PV took the job on, yet she is the one facing the music while the others have slipped away unnoticed by the media spotlight.
"If individuals are found to have done wrong, the board will not stand by them otherwise the wrong doing falls on them. The individual only has a defence to his/her wrong doing if he can show he was under orders and where those order came from."
If, however, the cover-up began from the very top of the corporate hierarchy then the company itself has to shoulder the responsibility for this terrible injustice. The buck stops there, right?
