Were Asians unfairly treated in Post Office Horizon scandal?
AUTHOR OF NEW BOOK SEEKS CONVICTIONS LIST TO SEE IF ETHNIC WORKERS GOT ‘HARSHER’ JAIL TERMS
INVESTIGATIVE journalist Nick Wallis has told Eastern Eye of his suspicions that Asian subpostmasters were “dealt with more harshly” than their white counterparts by the Post Office when they were all pursued for alleged theft.
Wallis analysed dozens of cases for his book, The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail.
“Anecdotally, I think, non-white subpostmasters got bigger sentences,” he said.
His book is a searing indictment of the Post Office, which at first accused hundreds of subpostmasters of theft. But when it realised they were blameless and its own Horizon computer system was at fault, it engaged in a second criminal enterprise. Incriminating documents were shredded as it tried to cover up its own wrongdoing.
Wallis reckons the crimes committed by the Post Office are among the worst in modern British history.
“You would put it on a par with the infected blood scandal, the Hillsborough cover-up and Windrush,” he said.
As a result of the revelations made by Wallis, Eastern Eye has now asked the Post Office for a list of the 738 subpostmasters who were convicted of theft between 2000 and 2015.
One of them was Seema Misra, a subpostmaster in West Byfleet, Surrey, who was sent to prison for 15 months in 2010 even though she was pregnant with her second child at the time, for allegedly stealing £75,000. She was released after four months, and her conviction – along with those of 38 others – was quashed by an appeal court earlier this year.
Wallis, who was then working for the BBC in Surrey, was drawn into the Post Office story when Seema’s husband, Davinder, got in touch with him and said his wife had been sent to prison even though she was innocent.
Seema, one of the central characters in the book, has written an emotional foreword that will resonate with many Eastern Eye readers and especially the ones who were victims of the Post Office.
“I have always been a spiritual person,” she said. “When I was convicted of theft in 2010, my faith and my belief in justice was shattered. I was pregnant at the time. My despair caused me to think of suicide. I wondered if God wanted me to have something in prison to worry about. Thoughts of my unborn child kept a bit of hope, and me, alive.
“The Hindu religion has a concept of Ramarajya. That is the realm of what Gandhi called the moral authority of the people. It is a realm in which peace, honesty, prosperity and security prevail.
“I had come to England like many, believing Britain was a place of Ramarajya
which offered the opportunity to work, to thrive and to prosper. In 2005, Davinder and I invested our own money in a Post Office branch and retail business. We were proud to have become part of such a famous British institution.
“When I was sentenced to prison on my eldest son’s 10th birthday, all our dreams and hopes were destroyed.
“The Post Office did not quite get away with it. They almost did. It was reassuring and comforting to know that others believed something had gone wrong. They have kept the story alive when the Post Office very much wanted the story to die.
“Reading this book made me cry. Nick brings to life what the Post Office did to me and to my family in a way that makes reading it feel like re-living it. It is a story which broke my heart. You may think it could never happen to you – or to someone you love. This book shows you would be wrong. It happened to me.”
Wallis, who is donating 10 per cent from the sales of his book to helping subpostmasters in any way he can, said an investigation should now be launched into whether the Post Office was racist in the way it hounded those who were Asian.
“That is something which I think needs looking into,” he said, “I did start trying to make inroads into that with the Post Office, because what we need is a list of those 738 names.
“Now, I’m not saying that everyone with a white-sounding name will be white. And I’m not saying everyone with an Asian-sounding name will be Asian, but you can tell by looking at the names, who might be from the subcontinent, and who might not.
“First of all, they’ll give you a statistic of proportion. But the other thing that needs white counterparts. What you have now is a big control group, a large number of people who have been charged with different crimes. But there will still be large groups charged with false accounting, fraud, misrepresentation and theft.
“And you can probably put the sort of ballpark figure that they were accused of stealing into another sort of cohort. And then you can look at the sentences that were meted out to the white and the nonwhite subpostmasters. And anecdotally, I think, non-white subpostmasters got bigger sentences. It’s the difference between, say, six and 12 months in prison.”
Wallis referred to Harjinder Butoy, from Chesterfield, who was accused of stealing £206,000 from the accounts of the Post Office he ran in Sutton-inAshfield, Nottinghamshire.
He was jailed for more than three years after a jury found him guilty in 2008. Now his conviction has been overturned at the court of appeal.
Wallis said: “Harjinder Butoy got three bl***y years. I don’t know anyone who’s got a sentence like that who is white – nowhere near it. Of course, every case is different. There are always different circumstances which could be made in mitigation.
“There are 738 convictions – 640 are thought to be potentially unsafe. Who were they? What were they accused of? What were the sentences they were given? I think that information should be made public. It’s a matter of public record who these people are because obviously they were convicted in the courts. And their sentences will be a matter of public record as well as the amount of money they were said to have stolen.
“So, the Post Office holds that information. And it should be relatively easy to get it on a FOI (Freedom of Information) out of them. And then once you’ve got that information, you can start shaping further FOI requests to get what you actually need –the alleged crime, the value of the alleged theft or false accounting, and then what the sentence was.”
Wallis added: “The Post Office has apparently written to 640 people saying, ‘We think your prosecutions might be unsafe.’ That was mentioned in parliament for the first time last week. But whether those letters have reached them, whether those people are still alive, whether they’re in the country, whether they want to engage with the organisation that ruined their lives, is a serious issue.
“And I don’t think unless more efforts are made to contact the subpostmasters, we will see anything like the number of quashed convictions we should probably see. It could well be that some subpostmasters have gone back to India or Pakistan. If the Post Office is not making an extra effort to reach people who perhaps don’t have English as a first language, or might have difficulty reading a formal letter, then that is going to disproportionately impact non-white subpostmasters.”
A Post Office spokesman said: “We cannot give out a list of names for data protection reasons.”
The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail by Nick Wallis has been published by Bath Publishing Ltd; £25