Former Alderley Edge subpostmaster says his 'world fell in' after wrongly being labelled a criminal
18.02.2022 - 11:01
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
A former Cheshire sub-postmaster says his 'world fell in' after he was wrongfully convicted of fraud due to a flawed computer accounting system
Scott Darlington, 59, from Macclesfield ran the Post Office on London Road in the Alderley Edge from 2005 until 2009.
However, his life was 'ruined' when he lost the role and then became one of the hundreds of subpostmasters across the country to be wrongly accused of theft and fraud during the Horizon scandal.
READ MORE: Wrongly accused subpostmaster was asked to fork out £17,000 due to system faults
Horizon was an electronic accounting system within post offices, between the branches and Post Office Limited (POL), piloted in 1999 and rolled out in 2000.
It recorded all transactions at a branch and calculated how much cash and stock there should be.
However, from an early stage, the system appeared to have significant bugs which would cause it to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money.
Mr Darlington was investigated by the Post Office Ltd due to a discrepancy in his branch's accounts which eventually grew to over £44,000.
He was initially suspended, then had his contract terminated before ultimately being prosecuted.
After being advised by his legal team to plead guilty he was convicted in 2010 of false accounting and was sentenced to two months in prison, suspended for two years. He was also ordered to carry out 120 hours of community service.
A conviction he had to live with, until after a decade of fighting, it was overturned at the Court of Appeal last year along with dozens of other similar ones.
A public inquiry is now examining the implementation and failings of the system and whether the Post Office has learned lessons is now underway.
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