First judgment due as Post Office staff fight to clear their names
A judge is expected to make his first ruling on allegations that a glitch with the Post Office's computer system led to two former Post Office staff from Shropshire being wrongly jailed.
Tracy Felstead from Telford and Rubbina Shaheen from Shrewsbury are fighting to clear their names after being jailed over financial discrepancies they say were caused by the Post Office's Horizon computer database.
Miss Felstead, 36, was jailed for six months in 2001 after being convicted of stealing £11,500 from a post office in London where she worked as a teenager.
Mrs Shaheen, 53, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in 2010 over £43,000 which allegedly went missing from Greenfields Post Office in Shrewsbury.
She was initially charged with stealing the money but the Post Office agreed to drop the charge on condition that she pleaded guilty to false accounting.
Miss Felstead is one of more than 500 former post office staff who have brought a group action against the Post Office, saying they have been wrongly blamed for financial discrepancies as a result of faults with the Horizon computer system.
High Court
Mr Justice Fraser is due rule next week on the first of four High Court trials forming the group action.
The first trial, which began in November, relates to the contractual relationship between the Post Office and sub-postmasters.
A second trial, also due to begin next week, will examine the Horizon system itself, and will hear evidence from computer experts about alleged problems.
Mrs Shaheen, who now lives in Worthen, is not part of the group in the High Court proceedings, but is one of about 30 former subpostmasters trying to get their convictions overturned by the the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The commission has completed its investigations, but has told Mrs Shaheen it will not rule whether her case will go before the Court of Appeal until Mr Justice Fisher has made his first judgment next week.
But in a letter to Mrs Shaheen, case review manager Miles Trent said the decision could again be postponed until after the second trial, which is expected to last about a month.
Claire Kirby, a friend of Mrs Shaheen, criticised the delay, saying it was having an adverse impact on her health.
"Rubbina’s health is in tatters and she needs support and justice now," she said.
The Post Office insisted there was not a problem with the Horizon system.
“We have confidence in Horizon, which is robust, reliable and used across 11,500 branches by postmasters, agents and their many thousands of staff to process millions of transactions successfully every day, including on behalf of the UK’s high street banks,” it said.
