Has the Post Office covered up an appalling miscarriage of justice?
Lives destroyed. A pregnant mother jailed. Even suicides. As more than 500 of its former staff sue it after accusations of theft...
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
seven, in June 2011, two months after her release: ‘After that I didn’t want to leave the house. I was too ashamed to even visit my doctor.’
Her conviction became common knowledge, her husband was beaten up and heckled for being ‘a thief’. They sold the post office for less than half the price they’d bought it for and moved to another Surrey village to escape the finger-pointing.
Davinder found work as a taxi driver, but Seema remains unemployed: ‘I tried to become an Uber driver, but was refused because of my conviction. To this day I can’t get a job.’
In 2012, the Post Office, which has 11,500 branches in the UK, initiated a ‘mediation’ scheme among some sub-postmasters as part of their investigation. ‘Some cases were settled but we don’t know to what degree as it was kept confidential,’ says Nick Wallis, a former BBC journalist who has followed the case closely since 2010. ‘Some people attended mediation and some walked away because it wasn’t giving them what they wanted.’
Certainly, Noel Thomas, 71, convicted of false accounting and sentenced to nine months in prison in November 2006 after a shortfall of £48,455 was found at the post office he ran in Gaerwen, on the Welsh island of Anglesey, calls mediation a ‘waste of time.’
Although an accountant submitted a report on his case to Second Sight, who wrote to him to say they had found ‘no evidence of theft,’ he received the letter alongside a rebuttal of the findings from the Post Office and his criminal status — currently under review — so far still stands. A former local councillor, Noel says losses in his accounts under Horizon would inexplicably double over night, but that he was told by the helpline any problems would be sorted, so signed off the accounts. ‘I was devastated to be charged,’ he says. ‘I’ve never broken the law.’
He spent the first eight days of his sentence in a high-security prison, where he was allowed out for only an hour a day. He shared a cell with a drug dealer and spent his 60th birthday incarcerated.
When he was freed on a tag after 13 weeks, he couldn’t sleep with his bedroom door closed: ‘I kept thinking of the key being turned as it was inside. Sometimes I still keep it open.’ He says when the mediation process started he was denied access to documents such as his diary and accounts, which were ‘swiped’ by auditors from the branch he and his wife Eira had run since 1981.
‘The Post Office said there had been a fire in their warehouse and they’d got destroyed. Then they told Second Sight they had been water damaged and couldn’t be recovered. I thought they were telling lies,’ he says.
Forced into bankruptcy when the Post Office demanded their money back, he is now working at a garden centre. Any compensation he receives will go to his three grandchildren. ‘Money’s not important,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t mind a letter saying I was not guilty.’
Mother-of-three Wendy Buffrey, 59, was charged with false accounting and theft in 2010 after £26,500 went ‘missing’ from her post office in Up Hatherley, Gloucestershire. The theft charges were dropped, but she pleaded guilty to false accounting and was sentenced to 150 hours’ community service.
AS WITH everyone I spoke to this week, Wendy was told she was the only sub-postmaster to have this problem with Horizon, compounding their sense of shame and isolation: ‘I felt I was going mad.’
It was two years before Wendy, whose GP prescribed her antidepressants, was charged.
‘I felt sick. My solicitor said if I pleaded not guilty I’d get a custodial prison sentence,’ says Wendy, whose customers believed in her innocence throughout and came to court to support her.
Her home and the post office attached to it were seized and sold to recover her ‘debt’ and she had to move in with her son.
Now a health-and-safety consultant, she says defiantly: ‘I want to clear my name.’
While Second Sight declined to comment, the Mail understands they stand by their findings.
Fujitsu, the company that operated Horizon, still used by the Post Office, albeit in an updated version, also declined to comment.
The Post Office, meanwhile, which stands to lose tens of millions of taxpayers’ money in damages if found guilty, is adamant it owes no apologies.
A spokesman told the Mail: ‘The Post Office is strongly challenging allegations being made by a very small proportion of mainly former postmasters. The claims are now a matter for the court to examine.’
Only time will tell who is right.