From The Guardian

"UK taxpayers could have to pay as much as £1bn in compensation to former Post Office workers wrongly convicted of theft due to the defective Horizon IT system.

The system, which was installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu, falsely suggested there were cash shortfalls, leading to 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting in what is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

The Post Office has said it cannot afford to foot the huge cleanup bill for the scandal and last month the government, the service’s only shareholder, confirmed the taxpayer would step in.

This weekend new details of the potential magnitude of the compensation programme emerged."

The article contains a link to The Post Office Scandal blog by the journalist Nick Wallis, which gives details as to how this news was discovered. It makes for interesting reading.

Nick Wallis added a note to his blog post, pointing out that this story had originally been noted by Karl Flinders in Computer Weekly