Post Office investigators should pay bonuses into compensation scheme, say Tory MPs
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Post Office investigators should be forced to repay their bonuses and pensions into the compensation scheme for wronged branch managers, Tory MPs have said.
Senior Conservatives have demanded that Downing Street acts to claw back cash The Telegraph revealed executives were awarded for every sub-postmaster convicted during the Horizon scandal.
Sir John Redwood, a former Cabinet minister, said rules should also be introduced to curb excessive bonuses at publicly funded bodies.
More than 700 branch managers were convicted using evidence from faulty accounting software, which made it look as though money was missing from their shops.
The victims had their reputations ruined and lost their livelihoods as a result, with many left bankrupt and some even being wrongly sent to prison.
On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak announced that he was issuing a blanket exoneration of those affected and unveiled a fresh compensation offer.
He said 555 former postmasters who were forced to pay back money but were never convicted of an offence are being offered an upfront £75,000 payment.
Number 10 expects around a third of those, who were the least impacted by the scandal, to accept that opening amount, with the rest set to pursue higher payouts.
Those who were wrongly convicted are eligible for an initial lump sum of £600,000, with £138 million having been paid out to more than 2,700 claimants so far.
With the overall bill running into the hundreds of millions, the Prime Minister is facing calls to recoup the money from the Post Office managers responsible.
Tory MPs are also urging him to go after Fujitsu, the Japanese technology firm that made the Horizon software. Its UK arm made £22 million in profits last year.
Sir John said ministers “should consider how the public sector might get some financial redress for its losses imposed by Horizon, from both the computer company supplier and the well rewarded senior management who got bonuses as if they had done well”.
The MP for Wokingham added that in future, “chief executives of public services should not be paid large private sector-style bonuses, as they are bankrolled by the state and often have monopoly powers over customers”.
He said: “They do not take the same risks as CEOs of competitive large companies and are rarely removed from office for incompetence”, adding that in light of the scandal the Post Office and “other nationalised industries” should lose their powers to bring private prosecutions.
Sir Jake Berry, a former Tory chairman, said senior executives at the firm should be made to pay for overseeing an “absolute shambles and travesty of justice”.
He told TalkTV: “There’s a lot of compensation being paid out. I don’t really see why that should be the British taxpayer paying that and that’s why I’ll be calling on the Government to get Fujitsu to stump up some of that cash.
“A lot of senior executives at the Post Office … they got massive taxpayer-backed pensions, they got massive payments when they were in the job. That was for allegedly good performance in the job. We now know that’s not true.
“So we should be looking to take some of that back, particularly those pensions, from those very, very highly paid executives who oversaw this absolute shambles and travesty of justice.”
Bob Blackman, the Tory MP for Harrow East, also suggested that the managers responsible for the Horizon scandal should be made to pay a financial penalty.
He told the Commons: “Shouldn’t they be brought to account and lose their livelihoods and their pensions rather than those people that were wrongly convicted?”
Downing Street signalled on Thursday that it was open to the prospect of pursuing executives who are found culpable by an independent inquiry into the affair.
Mr Sunak’s spokesman was asked about the prospect of clawing back money from their bonuses, as well as Fujitsu, to pay for the compensation.
He said: “We will use the facts established by the inquiry to hold those individuals and businesses, should they be found culpable, to account, whether it be financially, legally or otherwise. But I can’t pre-judge the work that is literally going on right now in the inquiry to establish the facts.”
