A British postal scandal ruined hundreds of lives. The government plans to make right
A public inquiry into a British Post Office scandal that led to the wrongful convictions of more than 900 branch managers has resumed
LONDON — An inquiry into one of Britain’s gravest injustices resumed Thursday as momentum grew to compensate and clear the names of more than 900 Post Office branch managers wrongly convicted of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system.
A lawyer looking into the Post Office scandal grilled an investigator who denied he and others acted like “Mafia gangsters” in the original probe that postal employees said left them bankrupt and broken.
The inquiry that began three years ago resumed the day after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed to introduce unprecedented legislation to reverse the convictions following a television docudrama that created a huge surge of public support for the former postmasters.
“This is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history," Sunak said. “People who worked hard to serve their communities had their lives and their reputations destroyed through absolutely no fault of their own. The victims must get justice and compensation.”
In addition to the inquiry, police are investigating possible charges related to the investigation and prosecution.
Some things to know about the scandal:
After the Post Office rolled out the Horizon information technology system, developed by Japanese company Fujitsu, in 1999 to automate sales accounting, local Post Office managers began finding unexplained losses they were responsible to cover.
The state-owned Post Office maintained Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty. Between 2000 and 2014, around 900 postal workers were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with
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