SPECIAL REPORT

STANDING in the dock as she was sentenced to 15 months in prison, Seema Misra’s sense of disbelief was compounded by fear for the life growing inside her. An agonising pain ripped through her stomach as Seema, eight weeks pregnant, was paralysed with shock.

‘Then I blacked out,’ Seema recalls, through tears. ‘I was taken to hospital and came around in handcuffs.’ A quietly spoken mother-of-two who hadn’t incurred so much as a speeding fine before, she was overcome with shame.

‘I asked the prison officer to borrow his coat to put over my wrists,’ she says. ‘Changing into my prison uniform that day was the worst experience of my life. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I would definitely have killed myself. But I had to protect my baby.’

Seema, 43, was working as a sub-postmistress, running her village post office in West Byfleet, Surrey, when £74,609 went ‘missing’ from the branch’s accounts. Unable to offer any plausible explanation for the loss, she was charged with theft and false accounting.

At her trial at Guildford Crown Court in November 2010, she was accused of ‘cooking the books’ to cover her thieving before being convicted and jailed, her impeccable reputation as a pillar of her community in tatters.

But, now, a dramatically different version of events has emerged, which strongly suggests Seema is innocent.

She is one of 557 former sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses suing the Post Office in an historic class-action trial at London’s High Court. All of them experienced deficits in the accounts of their branches and were blamed by the Post Office for the losses.

They each insist, however, that the shortfall was the fault of Horizon, the Post Office’s IT accounting system introduced in 2000, which created inexplicable discrepancies.

There is mounting evidence to suggest that not only might they be right, but their employer covered up documents that could have cast doubt on their convictions.

In court last week, it was revealed that the Post Office, which staunchly denies all allegations and has spent £5 million of public money defending itself in court, has been aware of faults in Horizon’s system for years. An internal memo from 2010, two months before Seema’s trial, discussed a ‘bug’ in the software that was causing discrepancies that, if ‘widely known’ could have a ‘potential impact on ongoing legal cases where branches are disputing the integrity of Horizon data’.

Seema’s solicitor was not made privy to this memo. Instead, she and numerous sub-postmasters I spoke to say they felt pressured into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.

Most were in tears and still sounded traumatised. Branded criminals, they claim they were betrayed by an institution they had been proud to work for, losing their homes and livelihoods as a result.

Forced to pay back the huge shortfalls in their post office accounts, they were bankrupted and suffered marital breakdown from stress.

At least two suicides are attributed to the errors and ten former sub-postmasters were imprisoned.

In 2012, amid mounting discontent, the Post Office launched an independent investigation into Horizon.

In 2015, Second Sight, the forensic accountants they hired, issued a scathing report, saying they had ‘experienced significant difficulty in obtaining access to a number of documents we believe are necessary for the purposes of our investigation’.

They said there was ‘only limited evidence’ for charges of theft and they found a prosecution process ‘that appeared to be focused more on debt recovery than the interests of justice’.

The

Post Office, which did not make the report public, did not take on board any of its findings. Instead, it sacked Second Sight, issued a rebuttal to the sub-postmasters who had been sent a copy and declared they still had ‘found no reason to conclude that any original prosecution was unsafe’.

Nonetheless, Seema’s conviction is one of 32 currently being examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and she hopes this trial, set to last months, will finally hold the Post Office to account. ‘ They have ruined lives. They lied from the start, and once they started lying they couldn’t stop,’ she says.

Lord Arbuthnot, the Tory peer and former MP who led the parliamentary inquiry into the Post Office’s handling of the case in 2015, adds: ‘The behaviour of the Post Office throughout has been disgraceful. This is an organisation which is owned by the public, which needs to behave in a way the public should feel proud of.’

So, have hundreds of Post Office staff — employed for their trustworthy characters (all subpostmasters have to undergo rigorous criminal records checks) —

really committed fraud on a mass scale? Or are they all victims of a devastating miscarriage of justice?

Seema paid £200,000 for her post office, attached to a shop which her husband Davinder oversaw. Praised by her local police for her work in the community, she experienced problems with Horizon from the day she opened in June 2005.

‘Small amounts of money, under £100, appeared missing at first,’ says Seema. With sub- postmasters responsible for any losses, she put her own money back into the system to balance the books.

But the deficit increased. When she called the Post Office’s helpline, she was told any errors would correct themselves. But they didn’t. Her accounts soon showed her thousands down as she stayed up until 2am trying to make sense of it all.

When

she was audited by the Post Office that November, the shortfall in her accounts was £3,600, and she was warned her branch could be taken from her. ‘I felt threatened,’ says Seema. ‘I couldn’t afford to carry on balancing the books with my own money. I wasn’t given any help. I tried to pinpoint the losses by using just one till, instead of three. The losses tripled. It was a nightmare.’

In January 2008, two auditors turned up unannounced and found a £74,609 shortfall. They suspended Seema on the spot and sent someone else to run the post office. Naively, she felt relief. ‘I thought it was over, the Post Office would sort it out. They were supposed to look after me,’ she remembers.

Yet she had no further contact from the Post Office until that December, when she was sent a letter summoning her to court charged with theft and false accounting.

As a public body, the Post Office has a statutory right to prosecute without consulting the Crown Prosecution Service — which some experts say increases the chances of a wrongful conviction.

‘If the CPS were involved there would be a comparatively independent scrutiny of whether it is right to pursue the prosecution and what evidence should be disclosed to the defendant,’ says Lord Arbuthnot.

Seema says her solicitor was denied access to documents that would have allowed her a fair trial.

‘This sort of behaviour whereby a vulnerable defendant cannot rely on the proper behaviour of an organisation which has its own right to prosecute is truly shocking,’ says Lord Arbuthnot.

Like many sub-postmasters, Seema was advised that if she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of false accounting, the more serious charge of theft would be dropped and she was more likely to avoid prison.

That was a threat which Lord Arbuthnot says ‘will obviously weigh heavily with people’. He adds: ‘I believe there are a lot of people prosecuted by the Post Office who should not have pleaded guilty.’

Yet Seema, like most subpostmasters, also felt trapped into admitting to the charge of false accounting because she had to sign off her erroneous accounts simply to keep her business open.

After being found guilty of theft, the judge said he saw ‘no alternative’ to a custodial sentence and Seema, whose second property in London was seized by the Post Office to pay off the missing money, was sent to HM Bronzefield Prison in Surrey.

‘I was with drug addicts,’ she says. ‘There was blood everywhere because so many self-harmed. I worried for my baby’s health. Having tried for another baby for eight years the whole experience of pregnancy was ruined.’ She and Davinder told their elder son, then ten, that Mummy had gone to a special hospital because she was pregnant. ‘ He still doesn’t know (the truth),’ whispers Seema.

She spent three months in prison and gave birth to a second son, now