COURT of APPEAL on Monday (19) cleared 12 more former subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted under the Post Office Horizon scandal, among whom is also the former worker, who was widely covered in media at the time of conviction as he was a guest at the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.
Hasmukh Shingadia, 62, of Upper Bucklebury, West Berkshire said he was “on top of the world” after hearing the court’s quashing of his conviction. He was wrongly convicted of stealing £16,000 and was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence in 2011 as part of a Post Office crackdown on the alleged theft.
Shingadia’s case was subjected to widespread media coverage at the time, given it came just months after he had been Kate Middleton’s guest at her royal wedding. Having run a post office and shop in Upper Bucklebury, close to where Middleton lived, Shingadia had become friends with her family.
“I was in all the newspapers as the royal wedding guest who was a thief and a fraudster,” said Shingadia, adding that the Court of Appeal decision was “massive for me and my family”.
“Being a guest at the wedding meant the press focused on my case in court. When I got the call from my lawyers to say the Post Office wasn’t contesting my appeal, I felt on top of the world. Of course, I’ve known I was innocent all along, but for the past decade the legal system has labelled me a criminal, as it has so many others, and that is disgusting,” Times quoted Shingadia in a report.
According to Shingadia’s legal team, just like other accused subpostmasters, he too was coerced to plead guilty as the Horizon system was portrayed as being flawless.
Shingadia also repaid the shortfall to the Post Office and his eight-month prison sentence was suspended for two years. He was ordered to carry out 180 hours of community service.
The recent quashed convictions of 12 former subpostmasters, also included three who served time in prison. The subpostmasters had been convicted in the past on the basis of data from a computer accounting system called Horizon, which showed unexplained shortfalls at branches across the country. The Post Office used its private prosecution powers over 15 years to convict hundreds of subpostmasters.
After it emerged that the technology designed by the Japanese company Fujitsu was faulty, Post Office officials ultimately abandoned the system.
The decision comes three months after the Court of Appeal quashed fraud and false accounting convictions for 39 others in April.
The cases were referred by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the watchdog that investigates miscarriage of justice claims in England and Wales. At the time, lawyers representing the subpostmasters forecasted that hundreds of other convictions were likely to be overturned.
Yesterday’s hearing brought the number of people to have successfully appealed against their convictions to 57.
Purushottam Agrawal and Linda Hess in conversation with Sanjoy K Roy
Swaransh Mishra, Kirpal Singh Panesar and Rajvir Singh Bhachu
