London:

An Indian-origin former manager of a post office in England has been wrongly jailed, while Sargham has rejected an apology from a former boss of a government-owned firm during an ongoing public inquiry into an accounting scandal.

Seema Misra, now 47, had her conviction overturned in April 2021 after the Court of Appeal ruled she was guilty of stealing GBP 75,000 from a post office branch in Surrey 12 years ago. was wrongfully imprisoned where she was all postmistresses. .

During a hearing of the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry in London on Thursday, former Post Office managing director David Smith apologized for the congratulatory email he sent after Miss Misra’s conviction.

“It was meant to be a congratulatory email to the team, knowing they had worked hard on the case,” Mr Smith said in his written evidence to the inquiry.

“However, knowing what I do now, it is obvious that my email must have caused great pain to Seema Mishra and her family when they read it and I apologize for that…if it turns out to be true. “I would never have thought that. It was ‘great news‘ for a pregnant woman to go to jail and I’m very sorry that my email could be read that way,” he said.

“However, looking at this email in light of what I now know, I understand the anger and distress it must have caused and sincerely apologize for it,” he added. .

But, speaking to reporters later, Ms Misra dismissed the apology as coming years after her ordeal.

“I was eight weeks pregnant – they need to apologize to my youngest son. It was terrible. I didn’t accept the apology,” Miss Misra told the BBC.

“We had my conviction overturned, no one came to apologise. And now they suddenly realize that when they have to appear at the public inquiry they have to apologise,” he said.

Miss Misra was sent to Bransfield Prison in south-east England and served four-and-a-half months, later giving birth to her second son while wearing an electronic tag.

Mr Smith told the inquiry that Miss Misra was used as a “test case” and that the success of the case led to overconfidence in the flawed Horizon IT accounting system.

“How can they test a human being? I’m a living being. I’ve heard my case used as a test case before. But hearing it over and over again is just annoying. Angry. , to be honest,” Ms Mishra told Sky news of her evidence.

The UK government, which officially owns Post Office Ltd, has paid hundreds of thousands of rupees in compensation to hundreds of sub-postmasters – many of them of Indian heritage – affected by the flawed Horizon software.

Earlier this year British Prime Minister Rishi Singh promised action in the landmark scandal in which subpostmasters were falsely accused of fraud.

Last month, a new law introduced in Parliament introduced the Post Office (Horizon System) Offenses Bill, a blanket amnesty to end convictions caused by false Horizon evidence. A public inquiry into the case, which is being phased in, is expected to conclude in July.

The controversial Horizon system, developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was first introduced in 1999 in some post offices for variable tasks, including accounting and stock taking. However, it appears to have significant bugs, which can cause the system to incorrectly report, sometimes involving large sums of money, like all these postmasters.

(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)