A former Post Office manager in England, of Indian origin, who was wrongfully incarcerated while expecting a child, has turned down an apology from a former executive of the state-run organization during an ongoing public investigation into an accounting debacle. Seema Misra, now 47, saw her conviction overturned in April 2021 when the Court of Appeal declared she had been erroneously jailed over 12 years ago on charges of embezzling £75,000 from her Post Office branch in Surrey, where she served as the sub-postmistress.
During Thursday’s session of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London, former Managing Director of the Post Office, David Smith, expressed regret for a congratulatory email he dispatched following Misra’s conviction. In his testimony to the inquiry, Smith indicated the email was meant to acknowledge the team’s hard work on the case.
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that, in light of current knowledge, his email would have caused Seema Misra and her family considerable emotional harm. “Even if this conviction had been justified, I would never consider it ‘excellent news’ for an expectant mother to be imprisoned,” he stated. “I am profoundly regretful that my email could be interpreted as such.”
Reflecting on his message with the perspective of today, Smith said he understood the resentment and anguish it would have provoked and offered his sincere apologies. Despite this, Misra rejected the belated apology, deeming it insufficient in light of her suffering. “I was eight weeks pregnant; they should apologize to my youngest child. It was dreadful. I can’t accept these apologies,” Misra told the BBC.
Misra remarked that following the reversal of her conviction, no one had approached her to express regret. She questioned the sincerity of the current apologies, suggesting they were motivated by the public inquiry. Misra was incarcerated at Bronzefield prison in south-east England and spent four-and-a-half months there, subsequently giving birth to her second child while under electronic monitoring.
Smith revealed to the inquiry that Misra’s case had been used as a “test case,” bolstering confidence in the flawed Horizon IT accounting system. “How can they experiment on a person? I’m a living being. I’ve been told before that my case was used as a test case. Hearing it repeated infuriates me further,” Misra told Sky News in response to Smith’s statement.
The UK government, which is the ultimate owner of Post Office Ltd, has disbursed millions in compensation to hundreds of sub-postmasters, many of whom are of Indian descent, affected by the defective Horizon software. Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to take action in response to the historic scandal, which wrongly accused sub-postmasters of fraud.
In March, a new bill introduced in Parliament, known as the Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill, proposed a blanket exoneration to overturn convictions based on erroneous Horizon evidence. The ongoing public inquiry, conducted in stages, is slated to conclude in July.
The contentious Horizon system, developed by the Japanese corporation Fujitsu, was initially implemented in 1999 in select post offices for various functions, including bookkeeping and inventory management. However, it appeared to possess serious flaws, leading to the system misreporting, occasionally involving significant sums as in the cases of these sub-postmasters.
