TWELVE YEARS TO CLEAR HIS NAME Lee Williamson ran the Post Office in Portstewart, a small seaside town in Northern Ireland, from 2003 to 2012. Good record. No trouble. Then the Post Office @PostOffice started running Horizon, accounting software built by Fujitsu @fujitsu_uk, and decided to trust that software over the man who had run the branch for years. It started small. £100 short one month. Exactly £1,000 short another month, because apparently fraud comes in round numbers now. By 2012 the alleged shortfall had grown to £17,000 and the Post Office suspended him without asking a single useful question. He resigned. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation. He had a clean record, a lawyer telling him a guilty plea meant he would probably avoid prison, and no explanation for numbers that made no sense. He got 18 months, suspended for 3 years. He carried that conviction for a decade. The shame nearly broke him. He was hospitalised. He ran a business people used to respect him for, then watched it get taken away by a shortfall that was never really there. He lodged his appeal in 2022, years before Mr Bates vs The Post Office turned this into a national story. In January 2024, after then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak @RishiSunak announced emergency laws to mass exonerate victims across the UK, his case was adjourned again. Nobody had worked out whether the new law even covered Northern Ireland. Around 20 other sub-postmasters there sat in the same limbo while England, Scotland and Wales moved on. The Post Office (Horizon Systems) Act finally passed in May 2024. On September 12, 2024, the Court of Appeal in Belfast quashed 4 of Williamson's convictions. The prosecution did not even bother fighting anymore. They folded once his legal team handed over a forensic report from investigators Second Sight. His solicitor Michael Madden @madden_finucane said Williamson is now fully exonerated. Williamson said he always knew he was innocent, and now he can finally say it and have it mean something. 12 years to undo a shortfall that never existed. That is the real cost of a scandal this country still likes to call a glitch. The Post Office ran this. The government owned the Post Office. Neither one gets to hide behind the software. Sources: @BBCNewsNI @UTVNews