SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, SPONSORED BY POST OFFICE Vinod Sharma cut his holiday short with a £1,100 flight home. The Post Office computer had a welcome home gift waiting, a £29,000 shortfall. Vinod Sharma ran a post office in Balornock, Glasgow for 38 years, from 1977 until he retired in 2015. In June 2015 he was away for 4 weeks with his wife when his assistant of more than 20 years rang to say the computer showed his branch was short by about £29,000. That computer is called Horizon, and the Post Office put it into its branches from 1999 to do the accounts. When it showed money missing, postmasters were held responsible, and more than 900 were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015. The company is owned by the UK government, which makes you a part owner, so congratulations. Vinod Sharma says he was told for years that Horizon could not make mistakes and that any shortfall came out of his own pocket. He says his training was 2 days, with no word on what to do about shortfalls. Two days of training for a system that could cost a man £29,000 is excellent value, if you are the Post Office. He cut the holiday short and paid about £1,100 for a single flight home. He checked 10 days of CCTV, found nothing suspicious at the counter, and worried about suspension, losing the £53,000 retirement payment the Post Office had offered him, and a criminal record. At least somebody investigated, even if it was the man about to be made to pay. Vinod Sharma says he turned to his union, the National Federation of SubPostmasters, and that a check of the branch showed the same gap. He says its General Secretary George Thomson told him Horizon does not make mistakes and the Post Office would assume he had stolen the money, so he should raise the cash and pay before the auditors arrived. The warning, he says, was suspension, the loss of his retirement payment and a possible lawsuit, which is sound advice if you happen to be the Post Office. Vinod Sharma later learned George Thomson was being paid by the Post Office and that the union depended on it for money. The federation's own website says its main funding is a grant agreement with the @PostOffice, in place since 2015, so I am sure the advice was pure coincidence. The federation says it could and should have done more for affected postmasters, George Thomson told the public inquiry in June 2024 that he was not too close to the Post Office ... His family lent him the money, and he paid the Post Office the full £29,000 from his bank account before the auditors arrived. They turned up a week to 10 days later and found another £700 missing, which he also paid, and no further action followed. The Post Office had its money before its own auditors walked in, which is what I call a fast turnaround. He says he has seen no evidence of any proper investigation. The Post Office never suspended him or prosecuted him either. No judge, no trial, no hearing, and justice has never been so cheap to run. He says he had months of sleepless nights and told nobody outside the family, because after 38 years everyone locally knew him and he feared his reputation would be wrecked and that the local paper might find out. In May 2022, aged 74, he told the Post Office Horizon Inquiry @PostOffInquiry in Glasgow that he was in shock and that it had been catastrophic for his family. The Post Office slept soundly through all of it. The repayment used up a large part of his retirement money, and press reports of his evidence say more than half of it went on paying back the relatives who lent him the cash. Happy retirement, from the Post Office. Vinod Sharma was one of 555 postmasters who took the Post Office to the High Court and helped expose the scandal, in a case that ended in a £58M settlement for all of them. He says that because he was part of that case he was excluded from the Historic Shortfall Scheme, the compensation scheme for postmasters made to pay shortfalls, and that he got very little from the court case, nowhere near what he lost. Nothing encourages people to speak up like a penalty for doing it. Since then the government has set up a separate scheme for the group case members, and government data show 473 of the 492 without convictions had full and final settlements by September 2025, with about £199M paid out. I could not find anything public on what Vinod Sharma has received or whether it covers what he lost. The government says about £1.5 billion has now gone to more than 11,500 people across all the Horizon schemes, and lovely statistics they are, none of which tell me whether he has been made whole. Paula Vennells was chief executive of the Post Office in June 2015. Neil Brocklehurst runs it today and has said he wants everyone eligible for redress to receive it as soon as possible, which is a lovely sentiment from a company that collected Vinod Sharma's money within days. I could not find any public response from the Post Office to his account. The Post Office answers to the government through the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, run by Jonathan Reynolds @jreynoldsMP, so it is a government owned company that, on Vinod Sharma's account, trusted a computer over a man with 38 years of service. It has been over 4 years since he gave his evidence, which is plenty of time to read a 9 page witness statement. Sources: @LBC @pressjournal and many others.