Victory for Post Office victim who lost home in IT scandal
A MOTHER who lost her home and went bankrupt in the Post Office IT scandal was cleared by the Court of Appeal yesterday.
Pauline Stonehouse was among seven former subpostmasters – wrongly convicted of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from their own tills – who were acquitted.
Their appeals were unopposed by the Post Office, which accepted that evidence regarding the reliability of the faulty Horizon IT system had been ‘essential’ to their convictions.
It means that 72 postmasters have now seen their convictions overturned, and hundreds more are expected to follow.
The Daily Mail has spent the last decade campaigning for justice for the victims.
Mrs Stonehouse, 49, who ran a branch in Seaburn, near Sunderland, was forced to plead guilty to six counts of false accounting in August 2008 after a £15,699 black hole appeared in the accounts of her post office.
She repeatedly sought to rectify the problem, and even put in her own money to balance the books, but the ‘missing’ cash continued to stack up.
When Post Office investigators failed to prove where the money had gone, they blamed Mrs Stonehouse’s family, leading her to challenge her own husband.
Eventually she was pressured into pleading guilty to the charges, despite her defence team raising concerns about the computing system.
Yesterday she said: ‘We lost our home, we lost our business, we were homeless with two children under the age of eight. We ended up bankrupt, we ended up with nothing.
‘I want an apology with my name on it... They made me feel as if I was the only one who had ever done anything wrong.’ The mother-of-two added: ‘I’m
‘We ended up with nothing’
disgusted. They could have ended our marriage. They knew they had a problem with Horizon, but they weren’t going to admit it.’
The other acquitted postmasters were Janine Powell, Angela Sefton, Anne Nield, Gregory Harding, Marissa Finn and Jamie Dixon.
The postmasters are being acquitted in small batches because of the enormous amount of work required to process their appeals.
Lawyers have trawled millions of documents to find the evidence for each case, and they can only be brought to court once this has been assessed by postmaster representatives and the Post Office.
A spokesman for the Post Office said: ‘Post Office is extremely sorry for historical failures... Ahead of final compensation, we are expediting offers of interim payments of up to £100,000 to people whose convictions have been overturned.’