THE CRIMINAL Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred a conviction based on new evidence about the Post Office’s Automatic Payment Service (APS) and Automatic Payment Terminal (APT) to the Court of Appeal.
Gareth Snow had been the sub-postmaster of the Corwen Post Office branch in Denbighshire. An audit of this branch took place in November 2000 after which Mr Snow was interviewed by Post Office Ltd (POL) investigators and charged with three counts of false accounting.
The prosecution alleged that he had falsified documents for accounting purposes, which must have been to cover a loss on the figures of £57,534.75.
He pleaded guilty on all counts of false accounting on July 13, 2001 at Caernarfon Crown Court and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
In 2021 Mr Snow applied for leave to appeal his conviction but later abandoned the appeal. An application to the CCRC was submitted in March 2023.
Mr Snow’s Post Office branch used APS/APT, which consisted of an electronic terminal connected to the telephone lines used to carry out transactions such as rent, rates, and utility bills. Mr Snow would include a record of these transactions in his manual account ledger.
Whilst Mr Snow has admitted that he falsified accounts, he said that that was because errors caused by the APT had resulted in merely accounting shortfalls.
Following a detailed review, the CCRC has decided that there is a real possibility the Court of Appeal will find Mr Snow’s conviction unsafe, notwithstanding his guilty plea, and quash it.
In reaching this conclusion, the CCRC has considered the Court’s judgment in the Horizon case of Hamilton & Ors v Post Office Ltd [2021], and we have reflected on that as a guide to the correct approach to other cases based on potentially unreliable data from Post Office systems. There are real similarities between Hamilton and Mr Snow’s case.
CCRC Chair Dame Vera Baird KC said: “There is evidence that the APS/APT could cause accounting errors. In Mr Snow’s case, he would say that there was no evidence of any actual loss.
“Whilst Mr Snow did not raise issues about the APS/APT at the time, accounting shortfalls were occurring that he could not explain. There appears to be no indication that POL made any attempt to investigate other possible causes.
“It will now be for the Court of Appeal to decide whether the conviction is unsafe and should be quashed.”
