Fresh boost for Shrewsbury Post Office boss in campaign

Rubbina Shaheen, who was jailed for 12 months in 2010 for false accounting, is seeking to have her conviction overturned, saying it was the Post Office's controversial Horizon computer system which caused the discrepancy.

Now it has emerged that the Communication Workers' Union (CWU) sent an email to sub-postmasters warning of a problem with the system, which it said would lead to cash shortfalls if undetected.

The union claims that on at least one occasion the Post Office acknowledged there had been an error and corrected the records.

Mrs Shaheen and her husband Mohamed, who together ran Greenfields Post Office in Shrewsbury, say the problem identified by the union sounds identical to the one which caused the problem at their business.

Mrs Shaheen, 50, is one of 100 sub-postmasters and mistresses across the country who are seeking to overturn convictions or court rulings which relate to financial irregularities they say are down to the Post Office's controversial Horizon computer system. She had initially been charged with stealing £43,000, but the theft charge was dropped after she agreed to plead guiltyto a lesser charge of false accounting.

She says she only agreed to plead guilty because she had been advised she would avoid a jail sentence.

The Communication Workers' Union email advised sub-postmasters what to look out for regarding the alleged fault, which it said would incorrectly duplicates payments.

The union claimed that in certain circumstances the payments were duplicated, effectively creating a record of money that does not exist, recorded by the system as being in the rural branch.

It would be the sub-postmaster's responsibility to make up the sum unless the duplicated payments were removed. The CWU claims that in one case documented by investigators, a main branch transferred cash to a rural branch but the computer recorded the transaction four times.

The union said that the postmaster concerned contacted the Post Office's financial department in Chesterfield after another postmistress recognised the problem as something she had encountered in the past.

Mr Shaheen said: "This sounds like a very interesting development, it sounds almost identical to the problem that Rubbina has had.

"I'm hoping it will be helpful with us in proving our case."

In August the Shropshire Star revealed that a team of forensic accountants hired by the Post Office had said the Horizon system was "not always fit for purpose" and that the "vast majority" of sub-postmasters who had been taken to court were likely to be innocent.

Ian Henderson, of financial investigator Second Sight, added that a common factor between the cases was that many began with theft and false accounting charges, with the theft charge being dropped in exchange for a guilty plea to false accounting.

But a Post Office spokesman said: "It remains the case that more than three years of investigations have not identified any transaction caused by a technical fault in Horizon which resulted in a postmaster wrongly being held responsible for a loss."