The wrongful convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters and mistresses will be examined by a public inquiry starting on Monday, 14 February.

 

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 Horizon.

A total of 72 former sub-postmasters have had their names cleared so far, including Damian Owen, the former manager of Glanadda sub post office on Caernarfon Road in Bangor.

Mr Owen, formerly of Menai Bridge, 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. Mr Owen had denied the theft and claimed he was untrained and working on an unreliable computer. His conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021.

The cases constitute the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

The inquiry will look at whether the Post Office knew about faults in the IT system and will also ask how staff assumed the blame.

It will also examine whether staff at software firm Fujitsu, which developed the Horizon software to complete tasks such as transactions, accounting and stocktaking, knew the system had flaws while data from it was used in court to convict sub-postmasters.

A judge will hear evidence on why sub-postmasters and postmistresses were singled out and whether they have been justly compensated.

Speaking in 2021 after his conviction was overturned Mr Owen said he had “lost everything” as a result of the scandal and even missed out on his child’s first Christmas and birthday, while he was in prison.

He said: “I lost all of it, 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, who now lives in Staffordshire, maintained his innocence throughout the trial and did not accept that any money was missing.

He added: “I only found out that they were looking to quash the convictions within the last month or two – almost ten years since the event.

“I want to see them punished. It shouldn’t have happened.”