British Post Office head fired after hundreds of the company’s branch managers were unjustly convicted of theft

British Trade Minister Kimmy Badenoch fired the head of Post Office, after hundreds of the company’s branch managers were wrongfully convicted of theft, due to flaws in the accounting software.

Since the late 1990s, the Post Office Public Corporation began installing the “Horizon” accounting program, but flaws in its programming revealed an incorrect deficit in the branches’ accounts.

There were some Post Office managers who refused to admit that there was a flaw in the program, but they forced the branch managers to pay the accounting deficit, which led to the bankruptcy of many of them, as reported by “Russia Today.”

Between 1999 and 2015, about 700 Post Office branch managers were sued, based on information from the computer program installed by Fujitsu, which destroyed the lives of some of them.

But in December 2019, a Supreme Court judge concluded that this system contained a number of “errors and defects” that may have caused postal branch accounts to be insolvent.

This January, the broadcast of a television series called “Mr Bates vs. The Post Office” caused a stir in the United Kingdom, a series that deals with the struggle of branch managers to clear their reputation and obtain compensation.

This case prompted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to announce a new law that includes “quickly acquitting and awarding compensation” to managers of branches of the postal service company “Post Office” who were unjustly tried on charges of theft, in order to fix what he considered “one of the largest judicial errors” in the country’s history.

“We have come to the conclusion that it is best for the Post Office Company to have new leadership in the future,” Minister Kimmy Badenoch said on Sunday to Sky News, confirming her dismissal of Henry Staunton from his position.

Staunton, who was appointed in December 2022, was not at the helm of the company during the installation of the “Horizon” software, which was found to be flawed, or during the subsequent legal cases.