Post Office scandal ‘robbed us of our lives,’ says victim
sneil@obantimes.co.uk
A Hebridean victim of the Post Office scandal has likened it to “a tsunami or a plane crash”: “It changes you forever,” she said.
The Post Office scandal, recently depicted by ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, is branded one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history.
More than 700 branch managers in the UK were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of a faulty accounting system, Horizon, which made it look like money was missing from their post offices.
Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined and forced to declare bankruptcy – and some have since died. The scandal has also been linked to several suicides.
To date, 93 convictions have been overturned in the UK. Many victims are still fighting to have their convictions quashed, or secure full compensation after being forced to pay out thousands of pounds of their own money for shortfalls caused by the faulty software.
It is not yet known exactly how many people were affected in Scotland. In 2020 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) - which investigates possible miscarriages of justice – wrote to 73 potential victims in Scotland.
By December 2023, only 16 people had come forward to ask for their convictions to be reviewed. That number may rise given the renewed publicity from the TV series.
In 2022 the SCCRC gave six people permission to appeal against their Horizon convictions in the High Court, after concluding Horizon evidence was essential to the proof of the accounting shortfall that led to the charges against them.
Former sub-postmaster Susan Sinclair was convicted of embezzlement in 2004 after a trial at Peterhead Sheriff Court and was sentenced to 180 hours’ community service. The SCCRC ruled her trial “unfair”.
It concluded the other five, who pleaded guilty, did so in circumstances that were, or could be said to be, clearly prejudicial to them.
One was the late North Uist postmaster William Quarm, who pleaded guilty in 2010 at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court to one charge of embezzlement. The court imposed a community service order requiring 150 hours of unpaid work.
In 2022, his widow Anne succeeded in a gruelling bid to quash the conviction after promising William on his death bed she would fight to prove his innocence.
Anne, from Claddach Kirkibost, told us: “The only reason my husband pleaded guilty was because he was told he would go to prison if he did not. He said: ‘If I go to prison, I will die.’
“It was terrifying. We lost our home, our business. He was not a well man. The whole thing broke him. It is as if you are going through a tsunami or a plane crash. It changes you forever.”
The appeal was “a huge relief” but, she said: “I will never get those years back. I am getting angrier and angrier that I was put through this for no good reason. They robbed us of our lives. Somebody has to take responsibility for all of this.
“I am so grateful to Alan Bates to have thrown light on it. It was falling on deaf ears for so long.”
Of those initial six cases, only the two convictions of William Quarm and Susan Sinclair have so far been overturned. The other four are awaiting an outcome.
One is a former sub-postmaster at Gigha Post Office, Aleid Kloosterhuis, who pleaded guilty to a charge of embezzlement in 2012 at Campbeltown Sheriff Court, and was sentenced to 12 months in prison.
People whose Horizon convictions are overturned are entitled to apply for £600,000 compensation.
The Metropolitan Police is investigating possible fraud offences arising from the prosecutions and a public inquiry into the scandal is ongoing.
The Post Office has said it is committed, along with the Government, to providing “full, fair and final compensation for victims”, saying it fully shares the aims of the public inquiry to “establish what went wrong in the past and the accountability for it”.
It is possible there are hundreds of people across Scotland who were accused of stealing money from their post office branches who were not convicted.