A former Cheshire sub-postmaster says his 'world fell in' after he was wrongfully convicted of fraud due to a flawed computer accounting system
Scott Darlington, 59, from Macclesfield ran the Post Office on London Road in the Alderley Edge from 2005 until 2009.
However, his life was 'ruined' when he lost the role and then became one of the hundreds of subpostmasters across the country to be wrongly accused of theft and fraud during the Horizon scandal.
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Horizon was an electronic accounting system within post offices, between the branches and Post Office Limited (POL), piloted in 1999 and rolled out in 2000.
It recorded all transactions at a branch and calculated how much cash and stock there should be.
However, in December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that Horizon's system contained a number of "bugs, errors and defects" and there was a "material risk" that discrepancies in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.
Mr Darlington was investigated by the Post Office Ltd due to a discrepancy in his branch's accounts which eventually grew to over £44,000.
He was initially suspended, then had his contract terminated before ultimately being prosecuted.
After being advised by his legal team to plead guilty he was convicted in 2010 of false accounting and was sentenced to two months in prison, suspended for two years. He was also ordered to carry out 120 hours of community service.
His conviction was then overturned at the Court of Appeal last year along with dozens of other similar cases.
A public inquiry examining the implementation and failings of the system and whether the Post Office has learned lessons is now underway.
Giving evidence at the Inquiry today (Thursday), father-of-one Mr Darlington laid out the impact losing his livelihood and being wrongly labeled a criminal had had on his life.
"It was humiliating and it got worse. Once the summons to come to court came through my world fell in a bit really as I knew this was going to be very, very serious" he said.
He said his subsequent conviction 'exacerbated' the breakdown of his relationship to the mother of his daughter, and that he was left battling depression and severe anxiety due to financial worries and the shame and stigma his conviction caused.
He spent three and a half years unemployed and had to survive on benefits with his conviction seeing him snubbed for roles.
"The whole thing was just so humiliating and embarrassing. I was in such a deep hole with this. I couldn't get any job, filling in forms saying you've got a criminal record, I knew they weren't going to go anywhere, especially at my age."
It also had a significant impact on his mental health he told the inquiry.
"Humiliation and embarrassment turned to depression and extreme anxiety when you realised it was going to be very difficult to get out of this situation," he said.
"At that point, there didn't seem to be any way of reversing the situation. I was in a pretty bad state.
"I stopped wanting to go out as people would stop me and ask how I was doing with the Post Office. So I became more withdrawn to avoid that situation.."
Mr Darlington was speaking at the initial part of the inquiry, which began in London this week, looking at the human impact of the scandal.
And he hit out at his treatment, accusing the Post Office of pursuing a "deliberate" and "attritional" campaign against himself and other sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses.
"I'm absolutely disgusted. It's atrocious. It's hard to believe this could go on for so long. Especially when it turned out they did know there was problems" he told the Inquiry's chair Sir Wyn Williams.
"They can't hide behind anything anymore.
"I genuinely believe they never thought they would be in this position, the power of that organisation versus people without the power or finances to take this on, they were safe in the knowledge they could sail through all this and we could remain collateral damage.
"Now that needs to change.
"The whole truth has to be revealed or it won't feel like justice.
"Not just handing out some money and one or two people getting a slap on the wrist about it.
"This was a deliberate policy to treat us like this, especially after they found out there were some problems.
"I don't want another apology because you can't say sorry for that.
"They weren't genuine mistakes this was an attritional policy used against us and to this day I can't understand why they went as far as they did, to ruin us, and carried on."
In other evidence this week one former subpostmaster said he contemplated suicide whilst a subpostmistress said her conviction for fraud caused her daughter to self-harm.
