ost Workplace prosecutors tasked with investigating sub-postmasters within the infamous Horizon scandal used a racial slur to categorise black employees, in line with paperwork obtained by campaigners.
Fraud investigators had been requested to group suspects primarily based on racial options and used a racist time period for workers from the colonial period of the 1800s which refers to folks of African descent.
The Put up Workplace Horizon scandal, which has been described as “probably the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK historical past”, noticed a whole lot of harmless postmasters convicted.
The data got here to gentle by a Freedom of Data (FOI) request obtained by Eleanor Shaikh, a supporter of the greater than 700 department managers who had been prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 on theft, fraud and false accounting prices.
The doc, thought to have been printed in 2008, requested investigators if the suspects had been “Negroid Sorts”.
Different classes on the doc embody “Chinese language/Japanese sorts” and “Darkish Skinned European Sorts”.
Responding to the FOI, a Put up Workplace spokesperson described it as a “historic doc” however mentioned the organisation didn’t tolerate racism “in any form or type” and condemned the “abhorrent” language.
They added: “We absolutely help investigations into Put up Workplace’s previous flawed doings and imagine the Horizon IT Inquiry will assist guarantee at this time’s Put up Workplace has the arrogance of its Postmasters and the communities it helps.”
The Put up Workplace started putting in Horizon accounting software program within the late Nineteen Nineties, however faults within the software program led to shortfalls in accounts, which sparked calls for on sub-postmasters to cowl the distinction.
Many had been wrongfully prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting, theft and fraud.
Between 2000 and 2014, greater than 700 sub-postmasters had been prosecuted primarily based on info from the accounting system, which noticed employees wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting.
Nonetheless, in December 2019, a Excessive Court docket choose dominated the system contained plenty of “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “materials danger” that shortfalls in Put up Workplace department accounts had been in actual fact brought on by it.
Many sub-postmasters have had prison convictions overturned.
