BLACK and other ethnic minority Post Office employees who were wrongfully implicated in the Horizon computer scandal were labelled with racial epithets, campaigners have discovered.
Investigators of the original scandal were instructed to group together suspects based on ethnic characteristics – as revealed through a freedom of information (FoI) request submitted by campaigners.
The phrase ‘negroid types,’ along with ‘Chinese/Japanese types’ and ‘dark-skinned European types,’ was used in the publication, which was released between 2008 and 2011.
It was campaigner Eleanor Shaikh’s FoI request that led to the discovery of these records.
Shaikh supports more than 700 branch managers who were wrongfully implicated between 1999 and 2015 related to the scandal.
Shaikh said: “I don’t know where they got the term ‘negroid’ from, or even then, how they felt that was appropriate. Why were those classifications needed? They even put a number on the racial descriptions, they wouldn’t put the label itself in the documents, and that tells you something.”
Responding to the FoI, a Post Office spokesperson described it as a “historic document” but said the organisation did not tolerate racism “in any shape or form” and condemned the “abhorrent” language.
The spokesperson added: “We fully support investigations into Post Office’s past wrongdoings and believe the Horizon IT Inquiry will help ensure today’s Post Office has the confidence of its postmasters and the communities it supports.”
One former operator, Teju Adedayo, who had received a one-year suspended sentence for fraudulent accounting in 2006, told The Times how upsetting the language was on the document.
Adedayo said: “It’s absolutely disgusting. I cried when I saw this document, they were collecting this data to obviously distinguish how they were going to treat people. It’s unbelievable.”
More than 700 post office operators were charged with theft, fraud, and false accounting because of the Horizon scandal, which has been referred to as one of “the most significant miscarriages of justice in UK history,” due to flawed accounting software that was put in place.
In 2022, a formal, independent investigation was launched to look at the Horizon scandal’s beginnings.
The Post Office began acting against sub-postmasters in 2000, using data from Horizon as evidence. By 2014, 736 had been criminally prosecuted.
A High Court judge, however, found in December 2019 that the system had several “bugs, errors, and defects” and that there was a “material risk” that the deficiencies in Post Office branch accounts were really caused by them.
Before their identities could be cleared, several committed suicide. Others became bankrupt while attempting to return money they did not owe, and several ended up in jail. Some also passed away during away this time.
Many sub-postmasters have had criminal convictions overturned. They have had access to a £19.5m interim compensation package, launched in June 2022.
Subscribe for our weekly news letter here!
You can unsubscribe us at any time
