Hero campaigner Alan Bates has accused the Post Office of spending 23 years trying to “discredit and silence” him while giving evidence to the inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal.
Mr Bates founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, and led a group of 555 subpostmasters who took the Post Office to the High Court over the scandal – which saw the company’s employees prosecuted over glitches in the IT system making it wrongly appear that money was missing from their branches’ accounts.
As the inquiry turns its focus to governance, redress and how the Post Office and others responded, Mr Bates – whose story recently became subject of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office – testified on Tuesday for the first time.
Decades-old documents shown to the inquiry showed how Mr Bates’ Post Office contract was terminated in 2003 after he refused to repay Horizon-related sums without being shown sufficient evidence that he was liable for them, having repeatedly raised concerns about Horizon’s integrity.
One internal Post Office document, titled “Horizon Integrity”, claimed Mr Bates had “been dismissed because he became unmanageable”.
