One hundred police officers are now working on a criminal investigation of current and past Post Office employees, civil servants and lawyers, as the Metropolitan Police investigates crimes related to the Post Office Horizon scandal.
The Met’s Operation Olympos has already identified dozens of people of interest.
The Horizon scandal – which started in 1999 with the roll-out of a flawed Fujitsu computer system – continued until 2019, when the judge in the group litigation case ruled that the subpostmasters’ contracts were unfair, and that Horizon “contained bugs, errors and defects”.
Those 20 years saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly prosecuted for fraud as the Post Office refused to recognise that its own accounting software was responsible for shortfalls.
Post Office news
The Post Office Horizon scandal: an explainer
Phase one of the police investigation will identify “key individuals” involved in subpostmaster prosecutions; phase two will probe wider offences.
Investigation lead, police commander Stephen Clayman, said: “The scale of the task ahead is unprecedented and I am confident we have an excellent team in place, with the support of cutting-edge technology to strengthen our search for information and evidence in among the 1.5 million-plus documents obtained and which will grow.
He added that if all Post Office criminal and private prosecutions, civil claims and contract withdrawals were taken into account there may be thousands of victims to identify.
The Met began looking into evidence of perjury offences by Fujitsu employees in 2020. The possible offences occurred during the trials of subpostmasters prosecuted over accounting errors. Software engineers Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers were among those whose evidence was examined.
Under Operation Olympos, individuals would be investigated over potential perjury and perverting the course of justice, said Clayman. However, according to Computer Weekly, he did not rule out looking into the Post Office policy of forcing subpostmasters to repay unexplained shortfalls, which could amount to fraud. The public inquiry in October heard that about £36m had been taken by the Post Office between 1999 and 2015 from subpostmasters, who had been forced to cover shortfalls in their accounts that didn’t actually exist.
Employees and partners of law firms involved in wrongful prosecutions may also be covered by the investigation as the operation progresses. Clayman added that the police will wait for the final Post Office Horizon public inquiry report before making final decisions on charging.
The public inquiry into the Post Office scandal will hear its closing statements on 16 and 17 December.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009.
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