Sub-postmistress claims Post Office put her in prison to save £15k

A former sub-postmistress has accused the Post Office of putting her in prison to “save £15,000”.

Seema Misra was eight weeks pregnant with her second child when she was handed a 15-month sentence in 2010 for six counts of false accounting and one of theft.

Mrs Misra had run a post office in West Byfleet, Surrey, for less than three years when her accounts were found to have a £74,600 shortfall as a result of faulty Horizon software.

She endured a two-year long investigation that included having her house searched and served more than four months in prison, but on Wednesday the inquiry into the Post Office scandal heard that she could have avoided the ordeal if bosses had paid £15,000 to provide the Horizon data her legal team had requested when she was going to trial.

Despite this, Jon Longman, a former Post Office investigator involved in her case, told the Post Office inquiry he wouldn’t have done “anything differently” with regards to the initial investigation.

‘Completely unethical’

The inquiry was shown emails between Mr Longman and Post Office colleagues discussing disclosure requests from Mrs Misra’s defence team.

They included one email sent to Mandy Talbot, a member of the Post Office’s dispute resolution team, in which Mr Longman wrote: “One of the sticking points in all of this was that the defence indicated they needed five years of transaction log data, but this would have cost the Post Office over £15,000.”

Mr Longman went on to tell the inquiry that he believed that the data requested was for a three-year period – however only a partial amount of so-called Audit Record Query (ARQ) data, which has previously been described as a complete record of all keystrokes made on Horizon, was eventually provided.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Mrs Misra said: “When I saw that £15,000 figure – I couldn’t believe it. They were willing to let an innocent person go to prison to save £15,000.

“People committed suicide as a result of this scandal – you had CEOs receiving millions of pounds, but they were worried about spending £15,000 on disclosure – it’s completely unethical.”

The mother-of-two also took issue with Mr Longman’s claim in his witness statement that he “wouldn’t have done anything differently” when he reflected on the initial investigation.

The former Post Office investigator conceded on Wednesday that he wished all data requested had been provided to defendants and their legal representatives.

Describing the search he and his colleagues carried out, Mrs Misra said: “He was going through my house from the morning to the evening and they were there that long because I had nothing to hide.

“I had a freezer and they moved that to see if there was anything behind it. Then I had a temple in a room and I asked them to remove their shoes but they didn’t, it was so horrible.”

Asking Mr Longman about the email, which was sent in the months leading up to Mrs Misra’s trial, Julian Blake, counsel to the inquiry, said: “Do you recall cost being an issue with regards to disclosure?”

Mr Longman responded: “On the transaction log data, I think it was actually three years the defence requested and it was rejected, and then I fed it back to legal – the solicitor dealing with this case – and I think he spoke to the barrister about trying to get a smaller period of transaction log data.

“The data was refused because it would take up a lot of our ARQ requests, we only had so many we would have per month or over the course of the year.”

Further anxieties around disclosure and growing concerns among Post Office employees were evident in other documents shown to the hearing on Wednesday.

One July 2010 email from Andrew Daley, then a security programme manager, read: “The investigators are concerned that if we lose a case based on the Horizon integrity, we’ll be in a world of trouble.

“They have also been getting queries from solicitors during case briefings. So this is still very much in the spotlight and not going away.”

Later on the inquiry heard evidence from Allan Leighton, the former Royal Mail chairman, who began with an apology.

Mr Leighton, who was chairman of Royal Mail from 2002 to 2009, said: “What’s happened has been a terrible thing for everybody who has been involved, in particular the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses.”

The former Asda chief executive added: “It’s unbelievable that it’s happened and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry that elements of that occurred while at my tenure at the Royal Mail. I’m sorry for that happening.”

On Thursday the inquiry will hear from Rodric Williams, a former litigation lawyer at the Post Office.

He is the organisation’s current head of legal for dispute resolution and brand.