- By William Silgueiro
- (General Dispatch) – The London Court of Appeal threw out the trial of 39 people who worked at the post office after a problem in the accounting software indicated that they were committing theft.
- The post office was astonished and backed down with the administrators who were to be sentenced without having committed any crime; the court was expected to sentence them to 42 offenses of theft and fraud.
- However, only 39 were acquitted of the case, and the remaining three identified that they were committing crimes in the office; however the media have not released the sentence for the guilty parties.
- The software that the post office had called “horizon” had been used by the company since 1999, but over the years the workers had announced that they had problems when manipulating it.
- The software was showing big problems when it was reporting the financial situation, reflecting big differences between the accounting and the inventory, and thus, it was presuming that the workers were committing crimes.
- The BBC media said that in several years it was wrongly blaming its employees, about 736 people were prosecuted, and some were even fired.
- Now, the British court did not let the post office off the hook for this type of problem, as it was aware that the software was presenting problems and did not find an immediate solution.
- The post office will now have to compensate each worker for large sums of money, after these employees had a respectable level of ethics and had damaged the reputation of each one since the post office pointed them out as thieves.
Adittional Information:
Breitbart: 39 Convictions Overturned After ‘Computer Bugs’ Saw Innocent Postmasters Accused of Theft
BBC UK: Post Office apologises as convictions quashed
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