"It was terrible. I haven't accepted the apologies."
A former sub-postmistress who was wrongly jailed while she was pregnant rejected an apology by a former Post Office executive who congratulated the team behind her conviction.
In 2010, then-managing director David Smith wrote in an email to colleagues:
“Brilliant news. Well done.”
Seema Misra was eight weeks pregnant when she was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
At the inquiry into the Post Office scandal, Mr Smith apologised to Mrs Misra, saying that in hindsight, his email was “poorly thought through”.
But Mrs Misra rejected his apology:
“How can I accept the apology? They need to apologise to my 10-year-old, they took his mum away on his birthday.
“I was eight weeks pregnant – they need to apologise to my youngest son. It was terrible. I haven’t accepted the apologies.”
Mrs Misra was wrongly convicted of stealing £70,000 from her Post Office branch in West Byfleet, Surrey.
She served four-and-a-half months and gave birth to her second son wearing an electronic tag.
Mrs Misra told the BBC that she had seen Mr Smith’s email before.
She added: “Seeing it again makes me more and more angry.”
Over 700 Post Office workers were wrongly prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft and false accounting.
This was due to a faulty computer system called Horizon.
Some were jailed while many others were left financially ruined.
Mr Smith was managing director of the Post Office from April to October 2010.
In his witness statement to the public inquiry, Mr Smith said his email following Mrs Misra’s conviction was “intended to be a congratulatory” to the legal team.
His email read: “Brilliant news. Well done. Please pass on my thanks to the team.”
When asked by Sam Stevens, counsel to the inquiry, why Mrs Misra’s conviction was “brilliant news”, Mr Smith replied:
“I would just like to place on record an apology to Seema Misra and family because of the way this has been perceived and portrayed subsequently.
“Looking at it through their eyes rather than through mine you can see that it may have caused substantial upset and I really do apologise for that.”
Mr Smith said his email to the legal team was a “thank you for all your hard work. It’s terrific that you got the result you got and I’m really happy that we have progressed”.
He added:
“It’s nothing more or less than that.”
But Mr Smith admitted: “In the benefit of hindsight and looking through the 2024 lens and not the 2010 lens, at best, from Seema’s perspective, you can see this is really poorly thought through.”
Mr Smith said Mrs Misra’s conviction, which has since been overturned, was seen as a “test” of the Horizon system, which the organisation believed was “tamper proof”.
Mr Smith denied knowing a Horizon bug before the trial of the sub-postmistress in 2010 and said he was “shocked and frankly appalled” at claims the Post Office knew of faults in the IT system while prosecuting Mrs Misra.
He also rejected claims that an investigation commissioned – known as the Ismay report – into the computer system’s integrity was a cover-up.
The essence of the report, produced by Rod Ismay who worked in finance at the Post Office in 2010, was that there were no fundamental problems with Horizon.
In May 2023, Mr Ismay told the inquiry he agreed with the suggestion he was asked to “present one side of the coin”, rather than carry out a full investigation.
Mr Smith denied the report was intended as a “counter-argument” to allegations against Horizon but accepted in his witness statement that in hindsight he should have commissioned a full, independent probe.
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