Shankul Bhandare
Allan Leighton, former chairman of the Royal Mail and Post Office, expressed his shock and horror at the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters, stating that he was unaware of the problems with the Horizon IT system or the extent of the legal actions. Leighton, who served at the organizations from 2001 to 2009, offered his “heartfelt sympathies to all those so terribly affected by these miscarriages of justice.”
In a witness statement, Leighton emphasized that he had no knowledge of the issues with the Horizon IT system and was not informed about the scale of the prosecution strategy pursued by Post Office management. He stated, “We had no idea of the numbers of prosecutions that were taking place. That was never raised up [to the board] over a long period of time. There was never a discussion about the number of prosecutions taking place at the Post Office itself. It was never seen as an issue in the organization. This was not a priority at the time.”
Leighton acknowledged that there were procedural failures and that it was a “mistake” for the prosecution teams not to escalate the issue to the board level. He said, “Boards tend to react to significant issues. It was never flagged up. The issue was there was nothing coming to the board from any direction.”
Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office aggressively pursued branch owner-operators across the UK for alleged theft, fraud, and false accounting, despite being aware of faults in the Horizon IT accounting software installed by Fujitsu in the late 1990s. Approximately 3,500 sub-postmasters and mistresses were wrongly accused, with over 900 prosecuted in court cases despite their protests of innocence and claims regarding the IT system’s flaws. The scandal is considered one of the most extensive miscarriages of justice in UK history.
