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More than £1m of unexplained transactions were transferred in to Post Office profit at the height of the Horizon scandal, leaked documents have shown.
The papers, seen by Sky News, show a snapshot of transfers from a Post Office “miscellaneous client” suspense account over a four-year period, up to 2014.
A suspense account is where unexplained, or disputed, transactions remain until they are able to be “reconciled”.
Unaccounted-for transactions were transferred out of the Post Office suspense account and into their profit and loss account after three years.
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Ian Henderson, director of Second Sight – the forensic accountants hired years ago by Post Office – said: “The Post Office was not printing money. It was accumulating funds in its suspense account.
“Those funds belong to somebody, either to third-party clients or to sub-postmasters, and part of the work we were doing in 2015 was drilling into that.”
Mr Henderson said they were sacked not long after asking questions about whether the Post Office profited from shortfalls paid for by sub-postmasters.
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted due to faults with Horizon accounting software.
A letter from Alisdair Cameron, the Post Office’s chief financial officer, to Second Sight in February 2015 states some “postings cannot be traced” to “underlying transactions”.
He added: “We are not always able to drill back from the combined totals to itemise all the underlying transactions.”
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