Fraught to justice

MORE than 20 years after his life was torn apart, Sir Alan Bates is finally set to receive compensation. The former sub-postmaster has reached a seven-figure deal to settle his claim over the Post Office Horizon scandal. He was one of hundreds of innocent people wrongly accused in the outrage, which has been linked to 13 suicides. Here MEG JORSH looks at the miscarriage of justice - and some more of the worst in British history...

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When Alan Bates took over the Post Office in Craig-y-Don, Llandudno in 1998, he invested £65,000 of his own money in the business.

It was all going well until October 2000, when the Post Office rolled out its new Horizon accounting software. By December that year, it was showing an unexplained £6,000 shortfall, later reduced to around £1,000.

In the two years that followed, Alan made hundreds of calls to the Post Office helpline, complaining that the system was faulty. Then in November 2003, his contract was terminated with no reason given - and he lost his investment.

The former project manager had been caught up in a massive software error, that led to more than 900 sub-postmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015. Others had their contracts terminated, or were forced to cover shortfalls with their own money.