A Bolton sub-postmaster has told an inquiry the strain of his experience with the Post Office caused him to suffer a heart attack aged just 33.
Momhammed Amir, now 47, started his career in 2001, helping out his brother who owned the branch in Westwood Park, Eccles.
After being drawn to the business because of its good reputation, Mr Amir eventually took further steps into the firm, buying two branches his in hometown of Bolton, one in Little Lever in 2002, and a Farnworth branch in 2007.
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However, speaking to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday, February 17, Mr Amir admitted that his plan to build a series of offices to pass on a legacy to his five children backfired, destroying his relationships.
He said it left him in severe credit card debt, and even affected his health - experiencing a heart attack as an otherwise fit and healthy 33-year-old.
Issues with Horizon, an electronic accounting system that tracked transactions at branches to calculate how much cash and stock there should be, often reported his Post Offices as being hundreds or thousands of pounds short.
In December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that Horizon contained a number of "bugs, errors and defects" and there was a "material risk" that discrepancies in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.
Mr Amir said: "At the beginning it started off as small amounts and then it started getting frequent and at every branch.
"I suspected my staff, sometimes myself maybe not doing something right, but I had experienced staff with me who had been in the Post Office for a very long time and with the help of them as well I knew it wasn’t me because it couldn’t have been all of this.
"On a regular basis it was in the hundreds of pounds, then it went into thousands quite a number of times.
"They were on a regular basis, at least every couple of months there was a few thousand pounds.
"At first it was ok because I was just paying that out of my own pocket and then it got to a point where there wasn’t much left from my salary and I started borrowing.
"Thankfully I had a good supportive family and they helped me out, and then eventually I started using credit cards and carried on accruing debt."
The problems were especially bad at the Little Lever branch, where the office once fell £2,200 short of where the system expected them to be.
After calling the helpline provided to subpostmasters and following their instructions, Mr Amir was shocked to see this figure double, putting the branch £4,400 short - a discrepancy he had to repay using his own cash.
Despite raising each issue with the helpline, and expressing concerns about the system itself, Mr Amir was always told it was just his branches running into issues.
In total, Mr Amir believes he's paid around £130,000 from his own pocket to balance to books across all three stores.
The stress from dealing with the balances took its toll on Mr Amir, he says, leading to him having a heart attack in 2007, shortly after taking on his third branch.
After another discrepancy of £3,000 was discovered in the Little Lever branch, Mr Amir went through all the paperwork with an employee, a friend he'd met through the Post Office, which resulted in the friend leaving the business believing Mr Amir was accusing him of being behind the imbalance.
A few days later, Mr Amir, a then 33-year-old who'd quit smoking nine months earlier and was regularly exercising and eating well, ended up in hospital after the heart attack.
He said: "It’s been 14 years since I had that episode of that heart attack, and at the time I didn’t know why it was caused because I was fit and healthy at that time.
"I was the youngest person in my surgery to have it.
"I do blame the Post Office for causing that, and even after that I had problems.
"I'm still suffering from severe depression and it just changed my life, it's never been the same after that."
After the heart attack, Mr Amir's family encouraged him to reduce his time spent at the Post Office and he sold the Westwood Park branch in 2009.
When he recieved his depression diagnosis several years ago, Mr Amir decided to give up all of his branches and leave behind the community work he'd done to help his local area, selling the Farnworth branch in 2015.
Despite putting the Little Lever office on the market almost a decade ago, Mr Amir has been unable to find a buyer, so his sister runs the branch on his behalf.
Even now, there are still issues with balancing the books at the branch, although Mr Amir's family prefer to not talk about the business with him - not helped by the lack of social contact he has with anyone due to his health conditions.
Speaking about the impact of the shoddy accounting system, Mr Amir said: "It seems like 20 years of hard work has all gone to waste and I've ended up worse off than I was when I started.
"The last five or six years have been very difficult for me, I've had a lot of issues with my heart and depression so I hardly get out of my house, it's just a biut difficult to go through day-to-day life.
"Because my offices were in my community and I was employing some of my friends and family friends, my reputation isn’t very good.
"I think people think ill of me for what I’ve probably put them through as well. It’s just hard.
"I’m in my bedroom most of the time all day and I don’t really have that relationship with anyone, not even my children, I’ve missed out on a lot.
"I've paid back all the money Iborrowed from my friends but to this day I've got huge debts on credit cards and had to remortgage one of my houses a few years ago.
"I feel like I’ve let my children down, not being able to do what I should have as a parent."
Other evidence this week heard from a former subpostmaster who contemplated suicide, a subpostmistress whose conviction for fraud caused her daughter to self-harm, and a subpostmaster from Alderley Edge who had his criminal conviction overturned.
