Wendy Buffrey, 64, who was prosecuted for an alleged £36,000 shortfall incorrectly recorded on her branch in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, told the newspaper: “I’m incandescent. I’m just so angry. We all thought they couldn’t do any more to us than they’ve already done.
“They need to pay for this. It’s yet another thing they’ve done that could potentially destroy one of our lives. They just don’t stop, do they?”
Meanwhile, Raoul Lumb, a partner at data protection law firm SMB, told the Mail it appeared to be “a remarkable breach” of the UK’s data protection laws and showed “a cavalier disregard for the rights of sub-postmasters”.
‘Difficult to see any justification’
He added: “It is particularly embarrassing for the Post Office because clause 12 of the document is a clause which explicitly obliges all the parties to ‘keep [it] confidential’.
“Given that, it’s difficult to see any justification for the Post Office to have made it public in a completely unredacted form.”
A Post Office spokesperson said: “The document in question has been removed from our website.
“We are investigating as an urgent priority how it came to be published. We are in the process of notifying the Information Commissioner’s Office of the incident, in line with our regulatory requirements.”
At the time the Mail approached it, the ICO said: “We have not received a data breach report on this matter. Organisations must notify the ICO within 72 hours.”