FAMILY TOLD YEARS AFTER HER DEATH Ever refreshed your inbox for an answer that never came? The case against Fiona McGowan was dropped and nobody mentioned it to her. Fiona McGowan died in 2009, aged 47, waiting to face court over £30,000 that the @PostOffice system showed as missing from her Edinburgh branch. She ran it with her partner Phil Cowan. The system was called Horizon. Phil Cowan says the area manager's first question was how soon they could pay the money back. She was charged with false accounting, which means recording figures wrongly in the books. Phil Cowan says he only found out years later, through a freedom of information request, a legal way to ask public bodies for their records, that the case against her had been withdrawn before she died. He says nobody at the Post Office ever told them. He told the @Sunday_Post she may well be alive today if she had not been facing court. Watch the end of the @itvnews clip, where a Post Office statement says it is deeply sorry for the suffering the events of the Horizon scandal brought. Events did it, apparently. In July 2025 the same Post Office said it apologises unreservedly for the suffering Post Office caused. Then read the Post Office website. It calls the scandal a dispute that mainly concerns whether a computer system was reliable. A dispute. It also says today's Post Office puts justice and redress for victims first. I see this everywhere. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry @PostOffInquiry found Post Office staff knew, or should have known, that Horizon could produce errors, and the company kept pretending it was accurate. Now Horizon takes the blame, the Post Office turns up as the saviour and history gets rewritten. The Post Office is owned by the UK government and in Scotland the Crown Office @COPFS handles prosecutions, so the state owns this too and had at least 2 numbers to ring. Her family only learned the truth years after she died. How is that human? How is that even a process? Nobody told Fiona McGowan. Not even by post.. Sources @Sunday_Post @DailyMailUK @edinburghpaper @TheScotsman