UK government to investigate Post Office over wrongly paid bonuses
The UK government has said it will investigate after the Post Office admitted it had wrongly paid thousands of pounds of bonuses to top executives simply for cooperating with an inquiry into a long-running miscarriage of justice.
The Post Office chief executive, Nick Read, agreed last week to return an undisclosed portion of the £455,000 bonus reported by the state-owned company in its annual report in March.
Kevin Hollinrake, a minister at the Department for Business and Trade, on Wednesday told parliament he had commissioned the government investigation into how the bonuses were awarded, as furious MPs said the Post Office had “added insult to injury” with the latest twist in the scandal.
“The situation is extremely concerning and deeply regrettable, and the Post Office is right to apologise,” Hollinrake said in response to an urgent question.
More than 700 operators of post offices around the country were prosecuted for theft and false accounting between 2000 and 2014 after the company’s flawed Horizon computer system falsely said there were shortfalls in their takings. The scandal, which resulted in some operators being sent to prison, has been described as one of the largest miscarriages of justice in British history.
The government last year said it would pay former post office operators up to £1bn in compensation, after the company said it would not be able to afford the bill.
However, the Post Office awarded Read and other senior executives large bonuses for the 2022 financial year, and said part of those bonuses recognised that “all required evidence and information [was] supplied on time” to an inquiry being run by retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams.
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