The Great British Post Office scandal, explained
Al Jazeera
How did UK Post Office workers end up wrongly imprisoned for fraud?
Public fury over a scandal which has ruined the lives of hundreds of British postal workers has reignited after a TV drama based on the affair was broadcast in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the new year.
Faulty computer software resulted in some 230 post office workers being imprisoned on false charges of theft and fraud. Thousands of others were accused of similar misdeeds.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story chronicled sub-postmaster Alan Bates’s legal battle against the Post Office, which had falsely accused him and some 3,500 others of defrauding the UK’s postal service.
Following the airing of the four-part mini-series, the number of signatures on a long-running petition calling for an official honour to be stripped from former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells rocketed to more than one million.
It had the desired effect. On Tuesday, Vennells bowed to pressure and pledged to “return my CBE with immediate effect”.
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