Royal Mail's silence: The case of Martin Griffiths

The British postal service tried to quiet the matter of Martin Griffiths, a post office branch owner who took his own life. This is another victim of Royal Mail, who was unjustly accused in connection with the scandal involving faulty software.

Angela van den Bogerd, former director of business improvement at Royal Mail, was interrogated as part of the public inquiry into the Horizon IT. The questioning concerned the case of Griffiths, who died in 2013 after financial discrepancies were discovered in his post office branch in Cheshire – reports the British "The Guardian".

It was established that Griffiths and his mother turned to Royal Mail for help. They wrote that the operator lived under "heavy pressure" due to a financial discrepancy amounting to as much as £39,000. He explained that the shortfall was the result of software errors. The investigation found that Griffiths' parents spent their life savings to cover these alleged shortfalls.

Additionally, after an armed robbery occurred at his branch, Royal Mail demanded Griffiths to return £7,500. He was then blamed for not following security procedures.

After these events, in September 2013, Griffiths attempted suicide. Although he was saved, a few weeks later he died in the hospital – points out "Guardian".

Royal Mail offered Griffiths' widow, Gina Griffiths, £140,000 as part of a settlement and insisted that the widow sign a confidentiality agreement.

The document revealed that "staged payments" were determined – which, as it turned out, was intended to encourage the widow to keep the matter secret. The post was to dose the money to the woman, to guarantee that she would keep silence about the matter.

During the investigation, an email sent to Royal Mail management by Alan Bates, a former postal operator, on the same day he learned that Griffiths had attempted suicide was also shown.

He wrote in it that Griffiths' case is "a perfect example of thuggery" that is applied to employees. Upon receiving the email, the management's first interest was not the health of the operator, but considered hiring a lawyer.

During the investigation, the Royal Mail director was accused of ignoring internal emails from 2010–2014, which indicated that not only Royal Mail but also the Japanese company Fujitsu, which developed it, had remote access to the internal IT system.

Although the Supreme Court criticized the director for "disregarding the reliability of facts," she received a bonus that same year.

Royal Mail, for over a decade pursued hundreds of postal operators for financial discrepancies, which later turned out to be the result of software errors in the Horizon system.