After Misra’s conviction in November 2010, Singh, 63, sent a valedictory email to his team. Her trial, he said, had been an “unprecedented attack” on the Horizon system, the computer software used by the Post Office. “It is to be hoped the case will set a marker to dissuade other defendants from jumping on the Horizon-bashing bandwagon,” he said.
It is now established that Misra, 47, did not commit the crime for which she spent four months in jail.
The mother of two was one of more than 700 people wrongly prosecuted in the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. At least 165 went to jail. The scandal has been blamed for at least four suicides.
There is now evidence that employees at both the Post Office and Fujitsu, which had designed the IT system, knew of bugs in the Horizon software even while sub-postmasters were being accused of stealing.
Documents were ordered to be shredded and evidence with the power to clear names was kept from the victims.
An independent inquiry into the scandal led by Sir Wyn Williams, a retired judge, is continuing and in the autumn will hear about the design of Horizon and who knew of errors in the system.
From December it will attempt to uncover who was responsible for failures in the investigation.
The Post Office said it was for the inquiry to “establish the accountability for past events” and that it was “fully engaging” with the process.
The organisation has waived legal privilege over its documents, meaning they can be scrutinised by Williams’s team.
Twelve years after Misra’s conviction, Singh, who still works as a lawyer, has spoken for the first time about his role — but he refuses to accept any personal responsibility for what happened, saying that “hindsight is a wonderful thing”.
While Singh insists that he did not know of problems with Horizon, there is evidence that others did. Victims, campaigners and lawyers representing the sub-postmasters are now calling for those responsible to be held accountable.
Paul Marshall, a barrister who helped Misra to clear her name, has asked the director of public prosecutions to investigate those who he says have perverted the course of justice by failing to disclose evidence. “I wrote to the DPP because what has emerged about what happened is so outrageous, because of the huge scale of consequent human suffering. People’s lives have been destroyed and it demands investigation,” he said.
Misra wants those responsible to be punished. “I was sent to prison for a crime I never committed,” she said. “They need to know what they did is wrong. They deserve to see what they put us through.”
Singh insists Misra had a “proper English jury trial”, but it is now established that her case, like many others in this scandal, was deeply unfair. Her prosecution was held to be an affront to the conscience of the court. The money she was accused of stealing was in fact a result of bugs and errors in the IT system.
The government has promised to pay compensation, but those responsible for destroying hundreds of lives — including a star witness in Misra’s trial who is alleged to have given false evidence in court — have never faced justice.
This is the story of how a government-owned organisation accused the men and women running its network of post offices of stealing, and then sought to cover it up once it discovered the true scale of the injustice. Opportunities to tell the truth were repeatedly ignored, forcing hundreds of people to be considered criminals long after those in the Post Office knew they could be innocent.
The first ‘offence’
By the time Misra was accused of stealing in 2009, Horizon had been installed for a decade. Its aim was to replace paper in the network of 17,000 branches. However, soon after it was rolled out, shortfalls began to appear in sub-postmasters’ tills, often of several thousands of pounds.
Under their contracts, people who ran shops in villages or suburbs with a Post Office counter were liable for any shortfalls that involved “carelessness or error”. The Post Office began prosecuting, convinced its new computer system had uncovered a silent crime wave sweeping through its network of shopkeepers. Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 people were prosecuted.
Misra moved to the UK from New Delhi, India, when she was 19. She married Davinder, and spent her twenties working in London. In June 2005 they spotted a Post Office available to buy in Surrey. They ran into problems almost immediately.
At the end of the first day’s trading, Misra found her till was nearly £100 down. Each day that first week it was short. By November, when an auditor visited, there was a £3,600 discrepancy. She was ordered to pay back the money immediately or have it docked from her salary.
As more money went missing, the couple desperately tried and failed to sell the business. Their savings were drained, and soon they were borrowing money to fill the gaps. In January 2008 another auditor visited and found a shortfall of £79,000. Misra was suspended and charged with theft and false accounting.
Like other sub-postmasters targeted by the Post Office, she admitted signing off accounts she knew were wrong to make it look like there was no shortfall, for fear of losing the business. But she refused to plead guilty to stealing and was determined to fight the case, convinced there had been a mistake.
The jury at Guildford crown court did not accept Misra’s plea. She was found guilty of stealing almost £75,000, and sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was to serve four. At the time, she was eight weeks’ pregnant with her second child, and portrayed in the media as the “pregnant thief”.
The false evidence
The star witness in Misra’s trial is now alleged to have given false evidence. Gareth Jenkins, a former Fujitsu engineer, is under investigation by the Metropolitan Police for failing to tell the court about the existence of bugs, errors and defects in Horizon that he is alleged to have known about at the time.
As Misra was preparing to stand trial, the Post Office was making preparations of its own. Months earlier, an article in Computer Weekly magazine had highlighted the case of dozens of sub-postmasters who denied accusations of stealing, and had asked questions about the reliability of Horizon. They had already formed a group, the Justice for Sub- postmasters Alliance, which aimed to expose Horizon’s failures.
Key to the Post Office’s prosecution of Misra was that Horizon was robust. Jenkins provided written statements in the trials of eight sub-postmasters, but Misra’s was the only one for which he gave oral evidence.
She watched in horror as he repeatedly told the jury that Horizon could not be at fault. “I can’t see any way that the computer system here is likely to cause a problem,” he said.
Jenkins also said that sub-postmasters’ accounts could be corrected only with their prior permission — a statement which would come back to haunt the Post Office.
Hiding the bug
Weeks before Misra’s court case, Fujitsu had held an urgent meeting with the Post Office to discuss a bug in Horizon which caused the branch to be out of sync with the Post Office’s accounting system. This meant that the branch could have a negative balance, even though the individual sub-postmaster believed they had successfully balanced. The meeting was attended by Jenkins, along with a number of Post Office employees. However, the existence of this meeting was not made public until 2018, when it was referenced in court.
The Post Office prosecuted 37 people in 2009 and 2010, as many as it had in any year so far, and suspended 214 others. It did not want to damage its prospects in court. “If widely known, it could cause a loss of confidence in the Horizon system,” a memo of the meeting said. “There could be a potential impact upon ongoing legal cases where branches are disputing the integrity of Horizon data. It could provide branches with ammunition to blame Horizon for future discrepancies.”
Telling the truth did not appear to be a key consideration. In fact, those at the meeting were worried that telling branches about the problem could highlight that “Horizon can lose data”. News of this bug was not disclosed to sub-postmasters.
Three months later, Jenkins insisted there were no relevant problems with Horizon.
Marshall, the barrister who has represented victims of the scandal, said this note was circulated to the Post Office lawyers before Misra’s trial. “This was an explicitly recognised management problem of this bug and the problems it presented,” he said. “The fact that the bug was discussed by the Post Office and Fujitsu less than a month before Ms Misra’s trial wholly undermined the prosecution’s case.”
The Post Office saw Misra’s conviction as a win. Soon after the prosecution, Singh, the Post Office lawyer, sent the email to colleagues, describing her trial as an “unprecedented attack on the Horizon system”.
What does Singh feel about it now? “That was then, a long time ago, after a jury trial, a proper English jury trial,” he said. “They had an expert, we had an expert, that was what the result was. Not a lot more I can add to that.”
Whom does he hold responsible?
“Anybody and everybody who should have known better. It’s all very well in hindsight, but at that time we had systems in place to make sure that nothing like that would happen, but obviously it did. It’s one of those things, isn’t it? But what I can say? This is obviously something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen: it did, and presumably the buck stops at the Post Office, or with Fujitsu, the people who put the system together. So I can’t say too much on that.”
Asked if he had a message for the victims, he said: “Not really — it was a long time ago. One does feel for them wholeheartedly. But that’s what it is, what more can one add?”
The cover-up
As more sub-postmasters joined forces with the action group, politicians started taking note. Lord James Arbuthnot, then Conservative MP for North East Hampshire, and Andrew Bridgen, the MP for North West Leicestershire, began championing the cases of sub-postmasters in their constituencies. They helped to pile political pressure on the Post Office to investigate whether Horizon was to blame.
In 2012 the Post Office hired Second Sight, a firm led by two forensic accountants, Ian Henderson and Ron Warmington. Henderson was sent into the heart of the Post Office’s headquarters near Old Street in London, where he sat alongside the prosecution team.
Henderson said a memo circulated after the August 2010 meeting regarding the receipts and payments mismatch bug “should have been enough to set off alarm bells”.
Evidence has since been released showing that Singh, the Post Office prosecutor, had been sent a copy of this memo by email. It then appears to have been printed off on the Friday before Misra’s trial. Singh denies knowing about the Horizon bug or being aware of the memo he received. “If any of us had known, we wouldn’t have continued with it,” he said.
That year, Henderson also met Jenkins, the Fujitsu witness, at Fujitsu’s office in Bracknell. It was here that Henderson heard a statement that stunned him. The Post Office had consistently insisted that it could not access the tills of sub-postmasters without their knowledge or permission.
Henderson claims that Jenkins told him otherwise. “It was along the lines of, ‘Well, of course, we’ve got access, we couldn’t do our jobs without it’. Certainly they were doing this in a way where they were in effect impersonating sub-postmasters and taking control of that machine.”
Days later when Henderson reported back to the Post Office, he claims he was assured that this was impossible. Three years later, on April 5, 2015, Second Sight published its final report. “Our current, evidence-based opinion is that Fujitsu/Post Office did have and may well still have the ability to directly alter branch records without the knowledge of the sub-postmaster,” it said.
Destroying the evidence
Unknown to the sub-postmasters, politicians and Second Sight, the Post Office had hired its own lawyers to investigate. On July 15, 2013, almost three years after Misra was jailed, Simon Clarke, a barrister employed by a firm of solicitors working on the prosecutions, reached a blistering conclusion: Jenkins had been aware of at least two bugs that had affected Horizon since September 2010. He had failed to comply with the duties of an expert witness, Clarke claimed, and should not be used again.
Clarke told the Post Office that it had been in breach of its duty as a prosecutor. “By reason of that failure to disclose, there are a number of now-convicted defendants to whom the existence of bugs should have been disclosed but was not,” he said. Crucially, the advice was that these defendants were entitled to be given this material.
The Post Office began holding weekly meetings to discuss the problem and to investigate. Then, in another letter, Clarke said he had discovered advice had been circulated in the Post Office that no typed record of these meetings should be kept. Staff were told to ensure emails and minutes from these meetings were shredded.
Clarke said this action could “amount to a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice”. The person who ordered the shredding was named later as John Scott, the former head of security.
Scott has never commented and could not be reached.
This advice could have blown apart the Post Office prosecutions, but it was never made public.
The Post Office maintained publicly that Horizon was robust, and Misra and hundreds of other sub-postmasters did not understand the gravity of what was said in the Clarke advice until eight years later.
Shifting the blame
Paula Vennells — who had been Post Office chief executive since 2012 and before that sales and network director since 2007 — put the blame squarely at the feet of Fujitsu. By 2014 the Post Office had entered into a mediation scheme with sub-postmasters, and MPs were keen to be kept up to date with its progress.
In February 2015 Vennells was called before the House of Commons business, innovation and skills committee. She told MPs that if there had been “any miscarriages of justice, it would have been really important to me and the Post Office that we surfaced those”.
At the time she said there had been no evidence of that. Days before she gave evidence, she was sent a list of questions, one of which was: “Is it possible to access the system remotely? We are told it is.”
In an email to colleagues about remote access, Vennells wrote: “I need to say no it is not possible and we are sure of this.” Vennells later told MPs that there was “no functionality for transactions to be edited or amended”.
Years later, when questioned again, Vennells blamed this on Fujitsu. In a letter written in 2020, she said: “I raised this question repeatedly, both internally and with Fujitsu, and was always given the same answer: that it was not possible for branch records to be altered remotely without the sub-postmaster’s knowledge.” With hindsight, she said, this information about remote access was “seriously inaccurate”.
Campaigners have been scathing about Vennells’s role in the scandal. In 2020 Arbuthnot said she was “willing to accept appalling advice from people in her management and legal teams”. He added: “She was faced with a moral choice and she took the wrong one, the one which allowed hundreds of sub-postmasters to be falsely accused, humiliated and ruined by the organisation she ran.”
Vennells said this weekend: “I remain truly sorry for the suffering caused to wrongly prosecuted sub-postmasters and their families. I continue to fully support and focus on co-operating with the inquiry, and it would be inappropriate for me to comment further while it remains ongoing.”
Sub-postmasters finally secured a High Court victory in 2019, when Mr Justice Fraser found that Horizon had been “riddled with bugs”. Fraser also referred the case of Jenkins and another Fujitsu witness, Anne Chambers, to the director of public prosecutions for alleged perjury.
Marshall wants Max Hill, the DPP, to go further and has written to him calling for an investigation into perverting the course of justice for failing to disclose evidence over the past decade. “The fact that in 2013 the Post Office’s head of security introduced a protocol for the ‘shredding’ of (unhelpful) documents is also plainly relevant to a policy of protecting the Horizon system against challenge/question,” he wrote.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority is also carrying out an investigation into the conduct of lawyers working for the Post Office. For Misra and the sub-postmasters, there is also a more personal plea: an acknowledgement that the Post Office wrongly told them they were alone in asking questions about Horizon.
Richard Moorhead, a professor of law and professional ethics at Exeter Law School, has been studying the scandal.
He said the Post Office’s approach to disclosure, plus the policy of telling sub-postmasters they were the only ones suffering problems, “point potentially to deliberate attempts to conceal or divert the course of justice in ways that were either reckless or intentional and therefore potentially a crime”.
Sub-postmasters were also told they could plead guilty to a lesser charge of false accounting, provided they retracted any criticism of Horizon. They were also never informed about the existence of a known error log about Horizon.
David Enright, a lawyer representing more than 100 sub-postmasters, said his clients remained “very concerned that those responsible for orchestrating and perpetuating this scandal are yet to face the consequences of their actions”. He called on the Met Police and the independent inquiryto determine “who is responsible”.
Twelve years after being sent to jail, Misra has gradually rebuilt her life.
The £100,000 interim payment she received from the compensation scheme was largely swallowed up by mortgage arrears and credit card debts. In time, she is hopeful of receiving a larger payment — enough to buy the family home they had dreamt of.
Now she wants answers — and for those responsible to be held accountable. “I do want to punish them, but I don’t want them to know how it feels to be away from your family,” she said. Mostly, she just wants to move on. “I’m mentally exhausted. I still hope that I’ll get up in the morning and it was a nightmare.""
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
