Justice for wrongly accused sub-postmaster
THE court of appeal has set aside the wrongful conviction of Hasmukh Shingadia for stealing £16,000 from the Post Office.
It turns out the organisation’s Horizon computer was at fault and led to the prosecution of 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses across the country.
There are now calls for the Post Office CEO, Paula Vennells, who was responsible for presiding over “one of the biggest scandals in British legal history”, to be stripped of her CBE. A more fitting outcome would be to see her and her senior executives jailed for 20 years.
I know Hasmukh and his wife Chandrika, who run a sub-post office from their Peach’s Store in the village of Upper Bucklebury in west Berkshire. They were invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29, 2011, because their customers included the bride’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton. He cleared Chandrika to wear a sari to the ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
I drove down to see Hasmukh and Chandrika and their daughters, Meera and Maya, just a few days before the wedding. They were a traditional Gujarati family who lived above the shop.
They showed me the elaborate wedding invitation card which they have retained. Being Indians, they felt they couldn’t go without wedding presents.
So, I arranged for a couple of Indian designers to send in outfits for the Duchess which her father picked up from the shop. One was a silver-chain dress made by Rishti Dewan, who now lives in California.
While Hasmukh wore a morning suit, Chandrika flew to Gujarat to buy a blue sari. She told me she was complimented by David Emmanuel, who had designed Princess Diana’s famous wedding dress with his former wife, Elizabeth Emmanuel: “‘Oh, my God! What a beautiful sari.’ Considering who he was, it was a great compliment.”
I was shocked when a couple of months after the wedding, Hasmukh was told he would be prosecuted unless he pleaded guilty to theft.
I wish he had taken me into his confidence when I had gone to see him. I could have urged him to contest the charge. He was not jailed, but given a twoyear suspended sentence and and told to pay the £16,000 he hadn’t stolen. He was made to carry out 200 hours of community service by working at a local Sue Ryder charity shop. His reputation was, of course, ruined.
Since the slate was wiped clean, the Duchess of Cambridge’s father has dropped by to say, “Well done.”