At least 70 people within the Post Office and Royal Mail knew of errors with the Horizon IT system, according to its manufacturer on the final day of the public inquiry.
Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted on the basis of accounting errors produced by the faulty Horizon system.
The last day of closing speeches was followed by an update by the inquiry’s chair, Sir Wyn Williams, on the likely timing for his report’s publication.
He brought the curtain down on almost three years of evidence by confirming his intention to publish his findings “as quickly as I sensibly can” but added the report would not be ready for “many months”.
The proceedings were closed to applause from members of the public, including victims of the scandal, who attended.
Earlier in the day, the barrister for Horizon manufacturer Fujitsu told the inquiry into the IT and Post Office failures it had identified a list of people who knew of bugs, errors and defects within the computer program.
These individuals were senior in the organisation, including Post Office board members, senior executives, in-house lawyers, and staff in the security and investigations teams, said counsel for Fujitsu Richard Whittam.
The inquiry received “unequivocal evidence” of these individuals’ knowledge of the Horizon flaws, he added.
It was these flaws that generated imagined financial shortfalls in Post Office branches which were used by the organisation to bring private prosecutions against more than 700 people for theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2015.
Others were bankrupted, lost homes, were isolated from and left communities, suffered ill health and relationship breakdown, and some died by suicide as a result of having to pay back money they never owed.
The scandal has been described as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent British legal history.
‘Not the fault of technology’
In concluding Fujitsu’s evidence to the inquiry, Mr Whittam said the Post Office…
