Suicide postmaster’s widow signed ‘pistol to the head’ gag order
Bosses are accused of trying to cover up scandal
THE wife of a postmaster who killed himself felt pressured into signing a ‘pistol to the head’ deal, it emerged last night.
Martin Griffiths was hounded after being wrongly suspected of stealing £100,000 of money from his shop.
And 16 months after his death his wife Gina was offered a settlement valid ‘for that day only’. She signed the deal, believed to include a payout of around £120,000 and a gagging clause preventing her from speaking out publicly.
Tonight a BBC Panorama investigation into the scandal will allege this was a bid ‘to suppress and cover up the truth’.
Mr Griffiths was one of more than 3,000 people wrongly accused of taking money from their own tills, when a glitch in a computer system was to blame.
The popular club cricketer had run his branch successfully in Great Sutton, Cheshire, for 14 years before shortfalls started
‘Hounded and persecuted’
to appear in 2009. This quickly blew a huge hole in his life savings as he ploughed £100,000 into the system to balance the books.
In September 2013, at the age of 59, he stepped in front of a bus, leaving a note apologising to his family and telling them he loved them. Mrs Griffiths said: ‘They hounded him, they persecuted him, there didn’t seem to be any end to it at the time. Martin hit rock bottom.
‘He was a proud man and I think he thought he was letting us all down. The worst thing was our children seeing their dad die. It was surely down to the Post Office, nobody else, so I blame them.’
She applied for compensation and in January 2015 received a Post Office report into her claim. She was contacted the following day with the sameday offer – a deadline that stopped her seeing an independent report that would clear her husband of wrongdoing. She withdrew from the compensation scheme a week later.
A senior Post Office director had been directly in contact with Mrs Griffiths, leading to claims of a cover-up.
Ron Warmington, an independent forensic accountant for Second Sight working on the case, told Panorama: ‘It was a pistolto-head deal, which said we’re going to offer you some money. If you refuse it, it’s closed.’
His co-director Ian Henderson told the programme: ‘I don’t know what that offer was, but what I do know was the indecent haste in which it was done. They felt if the facts behind the Martin Griffiths suicide became known, that would be tabloid headline news. This was a way of preventing that happening.’
Nick Wallis, author of the Great Post Office Scandal, said: ‘A decision was clearly taken to pay her off before anyone got wind of what the Post Office knew. That is an attempt to suppress and cover up the truth.’
A Post Office spokesman said: ‘It is not appropriate for Post Office to comment on individual cases of postmasters affected by the Horizon IT scandal, or about individual employees, as it is for the statutory inquiry led by Sir Wyn Williams to assess independently the evidence of past events and provide conclusions. We are sincerely sorry for the human cost of the Horizon scandal and we have taken determined action to ensure that there is justice, including supporting the overturning of convictions and paying compensation.’
Former chief executive Paula Vennells said she would not comment ahead of her appearance at the inquiry.