A victim of the Post Office IT scandal has attacked the company’s chairman for his “feeble” apology to those who were wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Tim Parker will step down as chairman in the autumn after resigning before the start of an inquiry into what has been described as “the worst miscarriage of justice in recent British legal history”.
Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a fault in a computer system.
Damian Owen, a former postmaster at Glanadda Post Office on Caernarfon Road in Bangor, was convicted in 2011 and jailed for eight months after the Post Office found discrepancies in stock and cash, with total deficiencies of £24,867 between April 2009 and August 2010. He had denied the theft and said he was untrained and working on an unreliable computer. His conviction was finally overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
Giving evidence to the second day of the inquiry into the human impact of the failings of the company’s software, Mr Owen said: “We never held that amount of money there. It was a small branch, as far as I was aware, the most held there was £13,000.”
Mr Owen told the inquiry that he had received a letter of apology from Mr Parker just days earlier.
“It is the most feeble apology I have ever received from anyone in my life,” he said, pointing out that the letter told victims – “please feel free to contact me” – even though there were no contact details.
He added: “They will not do anything to help in any way. They will not assist in any way. I would like a proper apology. I want a decent amount of money out of them.
Mr Owen said he “felt destroyed” after being convicted of theft.
Describing his time in prison Mr Owen, who now lives in Staffordshire, said: “I lost everything, the job was lost, our home was lost, any kind of decent job was out of the window after it.
“I have two children and when this all happened in December 2011, that would have been my daughter’s first Christmas. I wasn’t there for that, I wasn’t there for her first birthday.
“These are things that even if they do compensate in the end, it’s something that they can’t compensate me for.”
Mr Owen said Post Office executives should face criminal sanctions over the scandal and called for those who lied under oath about the Horizon computer system to be prosecuted for perjury.
He said: “I want there to be convictions, not only for the people who have perpetuated the whole conspiracy inside the Post Office, everyone from the top down who knew and was still pushing charges.
“I want charges against people not only in my court case who came to give evidence and lied under oath, I want each of them to receive a perjury charge.”
