Police investigating crimes linked to the Post Office Horizon IT scandal are looking at “dozens” of potential suspects, but don’t expect trials to begin until 2027.
Police are investigating possible crimes by Post Office and Fujitsu employees and external lawyers, following the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters after faulty Horizon software said money was missing from their Post Office branch accounts.
Three suspects have already been interviewed under caution and there are plans to interview others next year, according to police.
But no one will be charged until officers have read the final report from the separate public inquiry, almost 30 years after concerns were first raised.
Lee Castleton, a sub-postmaster from Bridlington, near Hull, who was bankrupted in 2004 after losing a two-year battle with the Post Office over Horizon, said: “I can’t understand why it’s taken so long, I can’t understand why things are having to be gone over and over and over… But you know, never give in, we’ll get there.”
Former sub-postmistress Seema Misra was wrongly found guilty of theft and false accounting in 2010, and sent to prison while eight-weeks pregnant.
She welcomed the update on the criminal investigation as “a step forward”, adding that “at least things are going in the right direction now – hopefully.”
She said it had already been a long wait for her and other victims of the scandal, which she described as having “taken its toll”.
“Did we expect it to take this long? No,” she said. “We wanted it to be done sooner, rather than later.”
The first media reports of Horizon problems were published by Computer Weekly in 2009. Alan Bates and his fellow sub-postmasters’ won the first of their two High Court victories in March 2019, eight years before the first criminal trials are set to begin.
Some 100 officers from around England and Wales are now working on what they’ve called Operation Olympos, which began in 2020. The investigation will be led by the Metropolitan Police in London, while Police Scotland, the Police Service of Northern Ireland and National Crime Agency are also involved.
Commander Stephen Clayman said the scale of the investigation was “unprecedented”.
“We have got, we think, over 3,000 people affected in some way, by Horizon. So it’s huge and we have got to put in a commensurate number of officers, to start moving it at pace,” he said.
The first phase of the investigation will focus on those making “key decisions” on investigations and prosecutions, looking at possible offences of perjury and the serious offence of perverting the course of justice.
A second phase will cast the net wider, potentially taking in senior post office executives.
Work is already underway on building some of the cases, and police are in regular dialogue with the Crown Prosecution Service.
The first trials may involve cases from either phase, police said, but timescales and the numbers of potential suspects could change as more evidence is gathered.
Officers are already working with 1.5 million documents in the case and expect this number to grow.
The investigation has also launched an online portal to allow sub-postmasters and others to submit evidence to the investigation.
