![]() ![]() “I’ve come across individuals who won’t even open mail from the Post Office, who simply won’t enter into the spirit of the remediation we’re trying to do, which is why we’ve been using external agencies to see if there’s a different way to engage.” “Having met with a number of them, I can understand why. “I’m deeply troubled that people aren’t coming forward,” Read said. That many victims were not willing to engage with the Post Office. He said that the number would have been higher but admitted Separately, Read said that just 86 of the 700 wrongful convictions of postmasters had been overturned or appealed following what he described as “a horrific miscarriage of justice”. Staunton said he had described the mistake as “baffling” in a letter to the Department for Business and Trade. He insisted that the error was not “dishonest” or “malicious”. “That was an error and I apologise unreservedly for that, and that’s certainly something that we should have identified.” Clearly the independent inquiry became a statutory inquiry half way through the scheme term, and the mistake was that we didn’t go back and revisit that particular incentive. “When the scheme was established it was part of the transformation of the Post Office. “Let me apologise for the error and the mistake that has been made in our incentive scheme,” Read told MPs, reiterating an apology made when the payments emerged last month. ![]() ![]() Both he and the Post Office chair, Henry Staunton, who was appointed last September, said it was important to ensure such mistakes would not happen again. Questioned by MPs on the business and trade committee, Read apologised “unreservedly” for the error. Overall, 30 out of 34 senior Post Office staff have done so. Read, a former Thomas Cook and Vodafone executive who took over in 2019, said he had returned the portion of his £455,000 bonus for 2021-22 that was related to the inquiry. Williams said he had not approved the bonus payment even though the Post Office stated in an annual report that it had received confirmation from him. Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office, and other senior staff received bonuses partly related to supporting the inquiry, led by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams. The scandal led to some operators being sent to prison, and has been blamed for four suicides. The IT system resulted in 700 postal workers being wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting between 20. ![]()
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