London police are investigating “potential fraud” in the scandal involving former postal agency directors who were wrongly accused of theft, one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the United Kingdom's modern history, Scotland Yard said on Friday evening.
Between 1999 and 2015, around 700 post office branch managers were prosecuted based on information from Horizon accounting software installed by Fujitsu, sometimes leading to life-threatening consequences.
On Friday evening, London police announced that they were investigating “potential fraudulent offenses related to these procedures,” such as amounts of money recovered as part of criminal prosecutions or civil lawsuits.
Scotland Yard was already investigating possible cases of perjury and perversion of justice. Two people have been interviewed by investigators, but no arrests have been made since this investigation began in January 2020.
The post office began installing the Horizon system in the late 1990s, but programming errors led to deficits in branch accounts.
Postal service executives refused to acknowledge problems with the software and forced postal workers to make up their accounting deficiencies, leading to the ruin of many of them.
In December 2019, a Supreme Court judge concluded that this system contained a number of “errors, errors and defects” and that there was a “significant risk” that it was the cause of deficits in post office accounts.
In the case, 86 convictions have already been overturned and affected employees have been paid £21 million ($32.4 million) in compensation.
Last September, the government announced that wrongfully convicted agency heads could receive 600,000 pounds (nearly $924,000) in compensation each.
Affected branch managers can reject the offer and take legal action, and those who have already received compensation or reached a settlement with the Post Office for less than £600,000 will receive the difference.
The British government announced in December 2021 that it would cover compensation for affected former postal workers and has already paid 120 million pounds ($185.4 million) to compensate 2,600 people affected by this scandal, in addition to agency directors .
Post Office is a public company that has managed post offices since the separation from Royal Mail in 2012, which in turn was privatized and listed on the stock exchange, and manages postal delivery.