Post Office’s ‘world of trouble’ over IT case

POST Office investigators feared there would be a “world of trouble” if the company lost a court case based on Horizon failings, an inquiry has heard.

The Horizon IT inquiry was shown an email sent in July 2010 by Post Office security programme manager Andrew Daley to a number of staff saying Horizon issues were “still very much in the spotlight and not going away”.

The email was sent around the time of a case against pregnant subpostmistress Seema Misra, who was handed a 15-month prison sentence on her son’s 10th birthday in November 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000.

She began running a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005, but was suspended in 2008.

Former Post Office investigator John Longman told the probe Mrs Misra had turned into a “test case” for the business.

He said: “It developed… and I didn’t know this at the time, I think there was a lot of people in different departments within the Post Office watching the outcome very closely.

“So it developed into a bit of a test case, I suppose you could say.”

The inquiry was shown an email Mr Longman received from senior lawyer Jarnail Singh following Mrs Misra’s case, which said it was hoped the verdict would “dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon bashing bandwagon”.

Counsel to the inquiry Julian Blake asked: “Was that a view that you shared at the time, that there was a Horizon bashing bandwagon?” Mr Longman said: “No, not at all. I do recall this email – I had to read it twice… just to confirm what had been written.”

More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Government-owned organisation and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.