(London) Hundreds of former postal workers wrongly accused and sometimes imprisoned for theft: British justice began to look into one of the largest miscarriages of justice in recent history in Britain on Monday. The judicial inquiry will last until the end of the year.
Posted at 12:30 p.m.
Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 postal employees were prosecuted, sometimes to the point of having their lives shattered, based on information from the Horizon system, installed by Fujitsu.
A faulty system
But in December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that this system contained a number of “bugs, errors and flaws” and that there was a “significant risk” that it was the cause of deficits in the accounts of the postal branches.
The public judicial inquiry, which has opened in London, will determine whether the Post was aware of the flaws in the computer system and ask how staff were led to take responsibility for it.
The judge presiding over the proceedings will then have to submit a report allowing lessons to be learned from the scandal, and not hand down convictions.
Postal Service executives, refusing to acknowledge problems with the Horizon software, had forced these postal workers to repay accounting shortfalls, many of them going into financial ruin.
‘I knew there was something wrong with the system but no one wanted to find out,’ Baljit Sethi, 69, who was forced to repay £17,000 to plug a hole in the loopholes, testified on Monday from the post office he ran in Brentwood, north-east London.
“We lost everything we had,” he described, saying he later had depression and “considered suicide.”
Jason Beer, solicitor assisting the inquest, said the case was “the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history”.
“Lives were wasted, families were torn apart, left homeless and destitute,” he said. “A number of men and women sadly died before the state publicly acknowledged that they had been wrongly convicted,” he added.
The government announced in December that it would pay compensation for tens of millions of pounds for former postal workers wrongly accused of theft.
The Post Office is a British postal service which is state-owned, after it separated from Royal Mail in 2012, and has 7,500 branches in the UK. Royal Mail was privatized and floated on the stock exchange.