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UK taxpayers might need to pay as a lot as £1bn in compensation to former Put up Workplace staff wrongly convicted of theft because of the faulty Horizon IT system.
The system, which was put in by the Put up Workplace and equipped by Fujitsu, falsely recommended there have been money shortfalls, resulting in 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting in what is without doubt one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British authorized historical past.
The Put up Workplace has stated it can’t afford to foot the massive cleanup invoice for the scandal and final month the federal government, the service’s solely shareholder, confirmed the taxpayer would step in.
This weekend new particulars of the potential magnitude of the compensation programme emerged.
The Put up Workplace Scandal weblog by the journalist Nick Wallis, who has written a e-book on the fiasco, reported that the Division for Enterprise, Vitality and Industrial Technique (BEIS) has now made three grants out there to the Put up Workplace that whole simply over £1bn.
The newest grant, made final month, was for £686m, and got here on high of earlier awards of £94m and £233m. In his publish, first reported by the Sunday Instances, Wallis stated the figures concerned meant the Put up workplace Horizon IT catastrophe was now a “totally fledged £1bn scandal”.
Between 2000 and 2014, the Put up Workplace prosecuted 736 publish workplace operators based mostly on info from a not too long ago put in laptop system referred to as Horizon. A number of the staff had been jailed following convictions for false accounting and theft, and lots of had been financially ruined.
Nevertheless, it was the software program, which contained bugs, errors and defects, that had triggered the issues, based on the excessive courtroom judgment that quashed most of the convictions.
Thus far, the Put up Workplace has supplied compensation to 777 of the two,500 subpostmasters who’ve utilized. Those that had convictions overturned have been supplied interim funds of £100,000 whereas their claims are assessed.
A spokesperson for BEIS stated the subsidy figures had been a “high estimate of what could possibly be wanted. It has not been spent and can solely be given to the Put up Workplace in arrears if and when required.”
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