UK Post Office scandal: 'People thought we were thieves', hears inquiry into wrongful convictions

euronews.com:

A former British post office manager broke down in tears as he gave evidence to a public inquiry on Monday into an IT scandal that resulted in hundreds of wrongful convictions in one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.

"We lost utterly everything, this was due to the Post Office," said Baljit Sethi, 69, who ran a local post office for over 20 years at Romford, east of London.

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters and mistresses were unfairly convicted of theft, fraud or false accounting because of a faulty computer system.

The former postmaster told the inquiry that he had successfully repelled armed robbers on several occasions. But as the new IT accounting system added up the office figures wrongly, resulting in inexplicable losses, his repeated attempts to raise the alarm with the Post Office went unanswered.

Sethi, who was not convicted but had his contract terminated, described how the experience had ruined his retirement plans to help his family. "We were on the verge of bankruptcy, of losing everything we had worked for over the past 25 years," he said, adding that at one stage he considered committing suicide.

"People who used to hold us in high esteem thought we were thieves," he went on. "People who used to stop us in the street to say hello, turned their face the other way... and we had no way to prove it or tell anybody that this is wrong."

Many other managers suffered the same fate, or worse. Some were sent to prison, lost jobs, or declared bankruptcy.

The defective computer accounting system, called Horizon and developed by the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu, was installed in local Post Office branches in 1999.

Despite receiving dozens of complaints, the Post Office