'Beginning of the end' Victimised operators welcome day of truth

Twenty-three years on from his wrongful conviction, the toll taken on Parmod Kalia was still clear as he attended the publication yesterday of the first findings from the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.

- Ben Quinn

Even by the horrific standards of the falsely accused post office operators' experiences detailed in the report, Kalia's ordeal and the destruction it inflicted on his family stood out as particularly shocking.

"The children just didn't know what was going on and they were asking me, 'Dad have you taken the money?' I just didn't have the answers," Kalia recalled, having read the account on page 30 of his struggles to obtain redress, even after his conviction for a theft of £22,202.01 had been quashed.

Kalia was also among the 59 people the report identifies as having been driven to contemplate killing themselves. "I attempted to commit suicide a number of times until I was helped," he said. "There was a point too when my marriage was under strain as well, but hopefully we are rebuilding bridges again, and trying to make up for lost time, for the lost years."

Attending the publication of the report at the Oval in London, Kalia welcomed the findings of the inquiry chair, Sir Wyn Williams, that Post Office bosses should have known their Horizon IT software was faulty but "maintained the fiction that its data was always accurate".

Yet the former post office operator - one of about 1,000 convicted of offences including theft, false accounting and fraud, based on faulty computer data between 1999 and 2015 - suggested the Post Office was still dragging its feet and "playing dirty tricks" on the topic of compensation.