Furious Post Office victim with PTSD 'wants bosses dragged through courts'
Sami Sabet owned three post offices in East Sussex and was among 736 postmasters convicted of theft and fraud.
A former sub-postmaster who suffers post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from being wrongly accused of stealing says he wants ex-boss Paula Vennells “dragged through the courts” for her role in the Post Office scandal.
Sami Sabet, 68, owned three post offices in East Sussex and was among 736 postmasters convicted of theft and fraud due to the company's faulty Horizon system. He was wrongly convicted of stealing more than £50,000 – only pleading guilty after being told he would likely be sent to prison if he denied theft.
Sabet was handed a suspended sentence of one year in prison and ordered to complete 180 hours of community service at Lewes Crown Court in 2009.
His conviction was overturned in 2021 but the father-of-one was diagnosed with severe PTSD and has suffered heart problems, and says the ordeal has taken years off his life. He was forced to take up jobs cleaning toilets in petrol stations to make ends meet after he lost his job at the Post Office.
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Speaking after Vennells handed back her CBE following a huge outcry, Sabat said it was “about time” she gave in to public pressure. But he believes she and others who were in charge of the Post Office at the time of the scandal should face their day in court.
He said: "It took the drama on TV and the petition the public submitted to force her to go. She should have done it much earlier... It's about time. They treated us like criminals, they called us criminals – but they are the criminals.”
Sabet said he was unable to get a good job or insure his home because of his criminal conviction. He said the “absolutely torturous” experience has “taken about five years off my life”.
He added: "Yet none of the bosses have been held accountable until now. I want to see those people suffer and put in front of a judge like we were, to suffer what we felt. I would like the Post Office to pay a lot so this never happens again.”
While the scandal itself has been rumbling on for several years, with only 94 convictions overturned so far, it has been brought back into the spotlight by ITV1's highly acclaimed drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which portrays the devastating impact on staff members' lives and their battle for justice. The four-part mini-series showed how the Horizon IT system was responsible for shortfalls in post offices across the country, which was blamed on the sub-postmasters running the branches.
‘Proper and real compensation’
Fujitsu, the IT company who developed Horizon, have also faced public pressure for their role in the scandal. This week, former postal minister Paul Scully suggested Fujitsu should now pay compensation to victims of its faulty system, telling BBC’s Newsnight that the company should “pony up”.
Sabet agrees that there should be “proper and real compensation”, and suggested that “somebody has to be held to account”. He added: "There were people in charge before Paula Vennells who knew what was going on... What about them?"
Despite his desire to see justice for all those affected by the scandal, Sabet worries his ill health – brought on by the stress of his ordeal – may mean he never lives to see the culmination of the scandal. He estimates that he lost around £2.8m from his three Post Offices in Shoreham and Brighton.
Does the Post Office still use Horizon?
The Horizon IT system was introduced to the Post Office in 1999 and was intended to revolutionise payments. Sub-postmasters were told to use the system for electronic accounting, transactions and stocktaking. However, faults in the system resulted in shortfalls and led to the false convictions of hundreds of staff.
Despite this, the Post Office still uses the Horizon system, insisting the latest version, that was introduced in 2017, is “robust”. Nevertheless, the Post Office says it is “not complacent” and are “continuing to work… to make improvements” – and intend to move away from it in the future.
The Post Office said: “We will be moving away from Horizon to a new IT cloud-based system that will be more user-friendly and easier to adapt for new products and services. This is currently being developed with the involvement of our postmasters.”
Currently the Post Office is still paying Fujitsu “tens of millions of pounds” every year, according to the service's now-chief executive Nick Read. He told the BBC in November: “It’s a 25-year-old system, it needs to clearly be upgraded and we’re looking and developing at the moment a new system so that we can get off Horizon.”
Former postal affairs minister Scully this week questioned why Horizon was still being used. He said: "I think there is a new system needed and I think it's pretty clear what the Post Office should do about having a new contractor." However, he accepted that the Post Office can't replace the system overnight and said it would need "a lot of funding" to do so.
