JUSTICE AT LAST
Victory for Mail as Post Office says it won’t contest dozens of appeals by postmasters who were falsely accused of stealing cash from their tills
POSTMASTERS who were branded crooks yesterday won a historic victory in one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
Dozens will have their wrongful convictions for stealing from their branches quashed.
Some postmasters who were pillars of their communities have been through 20 years of hell waiting to have their names cleared.
Post Office chiefs knew a system glitch in the Horizon computer terminals on counter-tops could be to blame for the missing money, but relentlessly pursued prosecutions against staff anyway. Their cruel vendetta against innocent postmasters ruined many lives and cost taxpayers millions.
But yesterday they finally caved in, marking a victory for the Daily Mail which has repeatedly highlighted the scandal and campaigned to save village post offices.
In March, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which examines possible miscarriages of justice, referred a record 47 cases of convicted postmasters back to the courts. Yesterday, ahead of the Appeal Court hearings, the Post Office announced
‘Expose the whole rotten lot of them’
that in 44 cases it will not contest their appeals – meaning it is all but certain those convictions will now be quashed.
Among those names are cleared is Jo Hamilton, who was convicted after the Horizon computer in her village post office in South Warnborough, Hampshire, showed inexplicable losses of £36,000.
She said: ‘I am over the moon. Twelve years I’ve been battling, and it’s just drained us. We’ve been fighting to prove we were innocent. Now, there it is, in black and white: I am not a criminal.
‘And they needn’t think for one minute we are not going to expose the whole rotten lot of them.’
She added she was sad for others in the group who will have to continue fighting through the courts for justice.
Lord Arbuthnot, who used to be her MP, said: ‘ Jo Hamilton’s victory is wonderful, wonderful news. It was because of the sort of person she is that her village turned out to support her at her trial.’
He added: ‘ The Post Office’s decision to contest only three of the cases referred by the Criminal Cases Review Commission is an admission of how very badly things went wrong over this saga.’
But some victims will never get their lives back, and one – Fiona McGowan – committed suicide after being accused of theft by the Post Office.
When £30,000 went ‘ missing’ from the branch she ran with her husband Phil Cowan in Edinburgh,
the couple were given a torrid time by the Post Office and she was charged with false accounting. Tragically, the charge was dropped yet no one informed her, and she killed herself in 2009.
Last night her husband told the Mail: ‘Good news today, but alongside the joy, there’s the obvious regret and sadness that my wife’s not around to further witness her vindication. The cruellest example of Post Office indifference is something I didn’t discover until years later – that the charges against her had been dropped. They were directly responsible for her tragic and unnecessary death.’
The true scale of the Post Office IT scandal has yet to emerge, with estimates that as many as 2,500 former employees may have been wrongfully accused of taking money from the till.
Hundreds of postmasters were sacked, went bankrupt or were wrongfully convicted after amounts appeared to vanish from their tills. At the height of the prosecutions during Tony Blair’s Labour government, more than one postmaster was dragged to court each week.
Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss who presided over the persecution, was paid £4.5million and made a CBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours for ‘services to the Post Office’.
Earlier this week, ministers launched a ‘review’ of the scandal, led by former High Court judge Sir
Wyn Williams, but MPs and campaigners labelled it a ‘whitewash’ and a ‘betrayal’, and called for a full public inquiry.
Post Office chairman Tim Parker said last night he was ‘sincerely sorry on behalf of the Post Office for historical failings’.
And new chief executive Nick Read said: ‘We are forging a new relationship with postmasters. The difficult lessons of the past are being learnt.’