Another 500 Post Office staff could have been wrongfully convicted of theft after last year’s £58million settlement over an IT glitch
- The scandal only came to light after a legal fight lasting nearly two decades
- Last month, 39 cases were sent to the Court of Appeal to be overturned
- The Post Office said it was leaving ‘no stone unturned’ in its review of new cases
Five hundred more Post Office staff could have been wrongfully convicted for theft.
The shocking number of new cases emerged after bosses delved through records as part of attempts to improve fractured relations with postmasters.
Their findings suggest there could be nine times more wrongful convictions for theft, false accounting and fraud than previously thought.
The cases were the result of glitches in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system which improperly suggested staff had their hands in the tills.
Seema Misra was jailed while pregnant and spent four months in jail after being blamed for a technical error which made it appear money was missing
But the scandal – described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history – only came to light after a legal fight lasting nearly two decades.
The Post Office has hired top London law firm Peters & Peters to trawl through thousands of pages of documents to determine how many of the 500 new cases can be overturned.
This is on top of approximately 61 convictions which were previously known about. At the height of the prosecutions during Tony Blair’s Labour government, more than one postmaster was dragged to court each week.
Last month, 39 cases were sent to the Court of Appeal to be overturned while another 22 remain on review.
Pathmanathan Thayaparan, 49, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, who now works as an electrical engineer for the NHS, believes he is one of the 500 cases being reviewed.
The father-of two, who only found out he may have been wrongfully convicted in December, said: ‘Even after all these years, I still feel the impact.
‘I would love to get my criminal case quashed.’ Last night MPs and peers called for the independent inquiry into the Horizon scandal to start as soon as possible.
Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, a longtime campaigner for postmasters, said: ‘It is extraordinary that the board of the Post Office has not resigned en masse, they should now be sacked.
‘There must now be the independent inquiry that the PM has promised.’ Karl Turner MP, a criminal barrister and former Shadow Attorney General, added: ‘It’s scandalous these people were made scapegoats.’
Paula Vennells, the former Chief Executive of the Post Office led the move to persecute the postmasters who have now been proven to be innocent
The Daily Mail has written extensively about the plight of postmasters as part of the Save Our Post Offices campaign.
Last year a group of more than 550 postmasters won a victory when the Post Office accepted defeat and agreed to pay a £58million settlement.
But the Daily Mail revealed last week that in a first tranche of payments handed out, staff received as little as £500 for their years of anguish.
The Horizon IT errors began in the early 2000s when random shortfalls started appearing in computerised accounts.
A Post Office sign. The scandal has been called one of the biggest miscarriages of justice
The Post Office accused postmasters of stealing the money.
In case after case it bullied postmasters into pleading guilty to crimes they knew they had not committed.
Many others who were not convicted were hounded out of their jobs or forced to pay back thousands of pounds of ‘missing’ money.
The Post Office said it was leaving ‘no stone unturned’ in its review of the 500 new cases, adding: ‘We are doing everything we can to assist the criminal justice process.’