Ex-Post Office boss sorry over jailed mother email

A former Post Office boss has apologised for congratulating the legal team behind the conviction and jailing of a pregnant sub-postmistress.

David Smith told the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal that in hindsight his email about Seema Misra's case was "poorly thought through".

"Brilliant news. Well done. Please pass on my thanks to the team," said Mr Smith's 2010 email to colleagues.

Mrs Misra was handed a 15-month jail term while being eight weeks pregnant.

She had been wrongly accused of stealing £70,000 from her Post Office branch in the village of West Byfleet in Surrey and was sent to Bronzefield prison on the day of her eldest son's 10th birthday.

Mrs Misra was one of more than 700 sub-postmasters and postmistresses prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft and false accounting after a faulty computer system called Horizon made it look like money was missing from their branches.

Some, like Mrs Misra, were convicted and sent to prison. Many others were left financially ruined and lost their jobs, businesses and homes. Some died while waiting for justice.

Hundreds of people wrongly convicted are set to have their names cleared under new legislation expected to come into force in July, but when it comes to financial redress, just 37 people have received full and final compensation settlements to date.

Mr Smith was managing director of the Post Office from April to October 2010.

In his witness statement to the public inquiry, Mr Smith said his email following Mrs Misra's conviction was "intended to be a congratulatory email to the team, knowing that they had worked hard on the case".

Asked by Sam Stevens, counsel to the inquiry, on Thursday why Mrs Misra's conviction was "brilliant news", Mr Smith replied: "First of all I would just like to place on record an apology to Seema Misra and family because of the way this has been perceived and portrayed subsequently.

"Looking at it through their eyes rather than through mine you can see that it may have caused substantial upset and I really do apologise for that," he added.

Mr Smith said his email to the legal team was "thank you for all your hard work. It's terrific that you got the result you got and I'm really happy that we have progressed".

"It's nothing more or less than that," he added, but admitted: "In the benefit of hindsight and looking through the 2024 lens and not the 2010 lens, at best, from Seema's perspective, you can see this is really poorly thought through."

Mr Smith was briefly in charge of the Post Office prior to Paula Vennells, who was chief executive between 2012 and 2019, and was depicted heavily in the ITV drama which thrust the scandal back into the spotlight.

He told the inquiry that at the time of his appointment in April 2010, problems with the Horizon IT system were lower down on his priority list with his focus more on the splitting off the Post Office from Royal Mail and refinancing the business.

However, he accepted that during the six-month period, he was responsible for identifying risks to the business and the risks had been flagged.

Mr Smith said that Horizon began to creep up the priority list when a new online version would freeze in hundreds of sites - which directly affected postmasters' ability to transact - hitting the overall business.

He also said that in hindsight there were risks around balance in the Post Office having to collect, investigate and then prosecute individuals.

"I think that the passage of time has shown that conducting the case, gathering the data, acting as the prosecution can lead you to a position where you might not think as independently as you should do about the quality of information," he told the inquiry.