More than 500 village postmasters were 'wrongly hounded for stealing millions' ...

Hundreds of village postmasters were wrongly accused of stealing because Post Office computers were riddled with 29 separate bugs, the High Court heard yesterday.

When millions went missing, sub-postmasters were jailed, made bankrupt and had their lives ruined – but glitches in the system were to blame, it was claimed.

As 557 former sub-postmasters began fresh court action, a judge was told that postal chiefs tried to hush up reports that the software was plagued by problems.

One sub-postmistress – Seema Misra, 43 – was jailed for theft when she was four months’ pregnant with her second son.

Overcome with shame, she considered suicide and her conviction means she is still struggling to find work more than eight years later. 

At her 2010 trial, the Post Office claimed that although one IT bug was known about, it only affected ‘one branch’ 600 miles away in Scotland.

But yesterday, the High Court heard that the problem in the Horizon computer system had actually affected 30 branches.

Patrick Green QC, for the sub-postmasters, said: ‘It has taken the process of this group litigation to establish that the Post Office has not been truthful.’ 

Bosses have always denied the computer system could be faulty, even though pillars of their communities like Mrs Misra, of West Byfleet, Surrey, were mystified by their terminals declaring shortfalls of tens of thousands of pounds.

Now the Post Office could be forced to pay millions of pounds in compensation if it loses at the High Court.

Yesterday was the opening day of the second of four linked cases into whether it cheated its own sub-postmasters. The hearings will last until next year.

Mr Green told the court that a computer expert commissioned by the claimants identified 29 separate bugs in Horizon, which records all over-the-counter transactions.

One, called the Dalmellington Bug, gave an innocent sub-postmistress a £24,000 hole in her accounts, the court heard.

Named after her village branch in Ayrshire, Scotland, it struck in October 2015 when she took delivery of a pouch from head office containing £8,000 in bank notes.

When she recorded receipt of the £8,000 in Horizon, the screen ‘froze’ when she pressed Enter so she pressed it again and again. Eventually the system wrongly recorded that she had accepted £32,000 cash.