Britain's CEO of scandal-ridden Post Office will step down next year

LONDON -- The chief executive of Britain’s scandal-ridden Post Office will step down next year, the company said Wednesday, as criticism mounts over the speed of compensation payments to branch managers wrongly convicted of theft or fraud because of a faulty computer system.

Nick Read said it has been a “great privilege” to have been chief executive of the company during an “extraordinarily challenging time for the business and for postmasters.”

Read, who took the helm in 2019, announced in July his intention to temporarily step back from the role to give his “entire attention” to the next stage of the ongoing inquiry into what is one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice that saw hundreds of branch managers wrongly convicted. The next stage of the inquiry is due to begin next week.

“There remains much to be done for this great U.K. institution but the journey to reset the relationship with postmasters is well under way and our work to support justice and redress for postmasters will continue," said Read, who was not at the company when the miscarriages of justice took place.

Read succeeded Paula Vennells, who has given back her Commander of the Order of the British Empire title that she received in 2019, following criticism of her actions in the top job.

The scandal around the Horizon IT scandal has been known for years but really became headline news at the start of this year when a four-part television docudrama aired.

The ITV show, “Mr. Bates vs the Post Office,” told the story of branch manager Alan Bates, played by Toby Jones, who has spent nearly two decades trying to expose the scandal and exonerate his peers.

Bates said that Read “hasn’t achieved anything for the victims” during his time as chief executive.

“It’s funny that because when I knew he’d taken seven weeks’ leave — in theory to prepare for the inquiry — I thought he’d taken seven weeks off to find a new job," he added.

After the Post Office introduced the Horizon information technology system 25 years ago to automate sales accounting, local managers began finding unexplained losses that bosses said they were responsible for covering.

The Post Office maintained that Horizon, which was made by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty. Vennells, who was chief executive from 2012 to 2019, a period that included the last few years of the scandal, had for years insisted that the system was “robust” despite the hundreds of workers who said they had done nothing wrong.

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 900 postal employees were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with some imprisoned and others forced into bankruptcy.

The number of victims is not fully known but the British government introduced legislation to reverse the convictions, brought by the Post Office itself.

The company, which is state-owned but operates as a private business, has had a unique function whereby it can prosecute its own staff without the need to contact police or state prosecutors. However, Read has said he couldn’t imagine using it again given what happened.