Senapathy Narenthiran said he was threatened by Post Office auditors, who claimed he owed hundreds of thousands of pounds.
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00:00 A restaurant owner in Ramsgate is trying to restart his life. He was once a sub-postmaster
00:06 for the post office but was given a three year jail sentence, being accused of stealing
00:11 thousands of pounds from the post office back in 2006. But Senapathi says he was innocent
00:19 along with hundreds others. Some are still fighting for justice today.
00:23 "We got in touch with the help desk to find out what's wrong. They said nothing wrong
00:27 with the horizon. It's working perfectly alright. You must have taken the money or you must
00:32 have given it too much to somebody or something. They always pass the buck to somebody else.
00:37 They don't want to accept anything. When I phone after maybe a week or a month or something
00:42 like that, they keep on telling me, 'Still it's your fault. If it keeps on happening,
00:47 something where what you are doing is wrong. So make sure that you don't make any mistake
00:51 when you're working behind the counter.' But they knew it's happening in the post office
00:58 system but they don't want to accept it from day one. Going back to 2005, it's happening
01:04 in there. But they said, 'No, you are taking the money. That's the end of the day. You
01:10 can't fight against the big giants.' So I said, 'Okay, whatever you say, I will take
01:14 it.'"
01:15 He ended up serving around a year and a half and described it as hell. And he says he's
01:21 struggling to go about his life now with a criminal record. It's known as the post office
01:26 scandal where more than 700 sub-postmasters and mistresses were wrongly prosecuted by
01:32 the post office, being accused of theft, false accounting and even fraud. We now know it's
01:39 due to errors in Horizon IT software. And today the CEO of the post office has handed
01:44 in her CBE after a million signed a petition calling for her to do so.
01:50 Back in 2022, the University of Kent hosted a panel aiming to shed light on the scandal.
01:55 If you actually look back, there's been very, very heavyweight pieces of journalism and
01:59 some really impressive journalists. So Rebecca Thompson who did the first Computer Weekly
02:03 piece, Nick Wallace from the BBC and subsequently Freelance, who literally wrote the book on
02:10 it and has done tremendous work in investigating it. That gathered pace but never really broke
02:18 through in the way that the drama subsequently has. And that's the interesting thing. Why
02:24 did that happen in the way after hundreds, probably thousands of mainstream media news
02:30 pieces in broadcast and in print, why did it take a drama to really get the public's
02:39 attention in the way that it has? It's fascinating.
02:41 This week the Prime Minister has confirmed the Justice Secretary is considering ways
02:45 to help others seek justice and to see convictions quashed. A post office spokesperson said,
02:51 "We're doing all we can to right the wrongs of the past, as far as that is possible. Both
02:57 post office and government are committed to providing full, fair and final compensation
03:02 for the people affected."
03:04 Senapathi hopes in the next few years to see his name cleared. And he hopes to see justice
03:09 for more victims of the post office scandal.
03:12 Sophia Akin for KMCV.