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Angela van den Bogerd is a businesswoman and a central figure at the hearings around the Post Office scandal due to her 33 years of service in the company. After the scandal gained publicity, Angela van den Bogerd quit her job at the Post Office in 2020. She was later employed by the Football Association of Wale in late 2020 but was fired in 2021 due to immense backlash.
According to the BBC, the Post Office scandal involved over 700 sub-postmasters wrongfully accused of fraud, theft, and false accounting after a new IT system called Horizon caused various accounting discrepancies.
Introduced in 1999, Horizon often glitched and showed false financial discrepancies, which led to hundreds of sub-postmasters being wrongfully fired, prosecuted, and imprisoned between 1999 and 2015.
The scandal is explained in detail in the four-part drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office. The titular character, Alan Bates, is one of the sub-postmasters wrongly accused of fraud and stealing. The show's first episode aired on January 1, 2024, on ITV. British actress Katherine Kelly plays Angela van den Bogerd on the show.
Angela van den Bogerd was in charge of handling complaints about Horizon from 2010
Angela van den Bogerd rose in the ranks during her 33 years of employment in the Post Office, where she handled various roles. According to Radio Times, Angela handled complaints about Horizon from 2010 and was also a part of the working group formed to deal with the scandal in 2014.
Angela van den Bogerd later became the Post Office's head of partnerships and was promoted to the organization's business improvement director in 2018. She left her job at the Post Office in May 2020.
Angela van den Bogerd played a prominent part in the hearings in 2019 when the sub-postmasters sued the company. The High Court judge Peter Fraser criticized Angela van den Bogerd for her testimonies in the hearings, saying she "misled" him.
“There were two specific matters where [Angela van den Bogerd] did not give me frank evidence, and sought to obfuscate matters and mislead me,” the BBC reported Fraser as saying.
After leaving her position in the Post Office, Angela van den Bogerd was appointed Head of People at the Football Association of Wales (FAW) amid much controversy. FAW CEO Jonathan Ford was warned of the scandal surrounding Angela van den Bogerd when he appointed her. He later lost a vote during an internal board meeting and had to step down as CEO in March 2021, but van den Bogerd remained.
According to BBC Wales, Angela van den Bogerd left FAW following a council vote to terminate her employment.
BBC dubbed the Post Office scandal as "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history"
Disclaimer: The following content talks about suicide. Reader's discretion is advised.
The BBC called the Post Office scandal "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history." The scandal bankrupted several sub-postmasters, imprisoned a few, and even drove some to commit suicide.
According to the BBC, following the introduction of a new IT system called Horizon developed by a Japanese company called Fujitsu in 1999, several sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses noticed accounting discrepancies in the system.
At first, several assumed they were at fault and tried to hide it, sometimes even paying back with their own money and keeping track manually. But, as the problem persisted, they guessed Horizon was at fault.
The Post Office caught wind of the accounting errors and wrongfully accused sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses of stealing and fraud. Seven hundred thirty-six sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were prosecuted. Some went to prison, some went bankrupt and were financially ruined, 33 died before their names could be cleared, and four fell into depression and committed suicide, the Mirror reported.
One such victim was 68-year-old Alan Bates, who lost his contract with the Post Office and lost approximately £60,000 of investment money. Alan tirelessly campaigned for the scandal's victims, with several joining his cause.
Another victim was Jo Hamilton, appointed as sub-postmaster at a village shop in South Warnborough, Hampshire, in 2003. When she noticed the discrepancies in accounting, Jo assumed she was at fault and resorted to using her money to pay it off. She even remortgaged her home twice and ended up in debt.
The Post Office fired Jo in 2006 when £10,000 was unaccounted for. She was charged with theft of £36,000 and was ordered to pay off the money to avoid jail time.
Seema Misra is another person affected by the scandal. Seema was reportedly eight weeks pregnant when she was sentenced to 15 months in prison for allegedly stealing £74,000. As per The Sun, Seema recounted her "living nightmare" of being pregnant in prison.
"Being pregnant in prison was horrendous. It was everything I had imagined and worse. It was unclean, I felt I had limited antenatal care, and I was constantly terrified someone would attack me. I'd convince myself someone was going to stab me and kill my baby. I'd gone from being a pillar of the community to a thief who was stealing money from old people. I never in a million years would have imagined I would have ended up in prison."
Harrowing details of the Post Office scandal unfold on ITV's Mr Bates vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones, Will Mellor, Monica Dolan, Alex Jennings, Katherine Kelly, and many more.
