Investigator made ‘threatening’ calls and forced disabled woman to use parcel lift

Stephen Bradshaw, a Post Office clerk-turned-investigator, called a sub-postmistress a “b----” and forced a wheelchair user to get into a parcel lift, a public inquiry was told.

A 20-year Post Office veteran, Mr Bradshaw was involved in the criminal investigation of several subpostmasters and mistresses – including a mother who fled the country following a prison sentence. Sir Wyn

Williams’ public inquiry into the Post Office scandal heard on yesterday that Mr Bradshaw called former postmaster Shazia Sadiq a “b----” during a phone call in 2016.

Ms Sadiq said in her witness statement that she had received “threatening calls” from him and his colleague Brian Trotter.

In August 2010, Mr Bradshaw allegedly made a wheelchair-bound former sub-postmistress to take a “tiny parcel lift” to an interview room as she could not use the stairs.

The Post Office investigator said he could prove this did not happen, although the inquiry heard that the Post Office has not challenged the former sub-postmistress’s account.

Yesterday, Mr Bradshaw was forced to address a description of himself and colleagues as being like “Mafia gangsters” collecting bounty with “threats and lies”.

Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, previously described the fraud investigator as having a “heavy footprint” in the scandal.

Mr Bradshaw joined the organisation in 1978 as a telegraph officer before becoming a counter clerk the following year and staying in this role until 1984.

He has spent around half of his 45-year Post Office in the investigations team – where he remains today – and became a fraud investigator after completing a two-week course in 2000.

Yesterday he was questioned about several sub-postmasters and subpostmistresses he investigated.

One case he was involved with was that of Jacqueline Mcdonald, a sub-postmistress from Preston who

moved to America after serving a prison sentence for pleading guilty to theft and false accounting.

Ms Mcdonald had been running the Broughton Post Office in Preston for less than two years when auditors visited her branch and eventually calculated a shortfall of £93,947.

She initially pleaded not guilty to charges of theft and false accounting, but was left “deeply disturbed” by seeing another sub-postmistress sent to prison after pleading “not guilty”.

“[I] decided I wanted the whole experience to be over and done with, so I pleaded guilty to theft and false accounting without any admission,” Ms Mcdonald wrote in her witness statement for the inquiry.

However in January 2011, the mother was handed an 18-month prison sentence, with the Judge telling her she had “breached the trust” of the Post Office and the community.

In her statement, she described how she “burst into tears and sobbed” once her cell door had been locked. “I never felt so lonely in my life,” she wrote.

Once she had declared bankruptcy and served her jail term, Ms Mcdonald moved to America in 2013 – where she had spent large parts of her life.

Despite being born in Preston, she wrote in her statement in 2022 that she had not returned to England since 2018 as she found it “quite traumatic due to everything that happened involving the Post Office”.

In his witness statement for the inquiry Mr Bradshaw was questioned on a claim by Ms Mcdonald that investigators had “behaved like Mafia Gangsters looking to collect their bounty with threats and lies”.

He said this was “incorrect” and said he refuted her claim that she was “bullied, from the moment [the investigators] arrived”.