I confessed to a criminal offense to save lots of my mom from dying in jail

Confessing to a crime you did not commit carries a cost. If anyone can attest to that, it’s Ravinder Naga.

It’s a cost that cuts far deeper than any penalty dispensed by the courts. There’s the humiliation of walking the gauntlet of whispered comments, the gnaw of anxiety about the future.

Ravinder, 49, has endured this – and more –these last 15 years. ‘I would be lying if I said there have not been times when it would have been easier just to end it,’ he says. ‘At times there was no light. I was known as the man who robbed his own mother.’

Still, the father of two would do the same again, even if he bitterly regrets that his family was ever put in the position where he felt he had to. But as he puts it: ‘My father didn’t raise me to be a coward.’

There was certainly no cowardice in the decision that pitched the quick-talking Scotsman into the nightmare from which he is only just emerging.

Back in 2009, Ravinder’s mother Gurbash Kaur Naga, known to customers and friends alike as Paula, was the sub-postmistress of Belville Street Post Office, in Greenock, Inverclyde. Now 70, she took over the bustling business with her husband Mohan Singh Naga, known as Martin, in 1994.

Son Ravinder would often help, even more so after the sudden and unexpected death of his father, aged 46, in 1999.

What happened next is, of course, depressingly familiar, thanks largely to this year’s award-wining ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Now known as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice ever seen in Britain, more than 700 Post Office sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing between 1999 and 2015 after faulty Horizon IT software made it look as though money was missing from their shops.

Many hundreds were convicted, some jailed and, tragically, a few took their own lives. The Naga family were also victims.

Until this week, Ravinder’s name had remained in the background, but the act of filial love that plunged him into the mire is deeply moving. For he confessed to stealing £35,000 when he hadn’t touched a penny, all to save his mother – who was also entirely innocent – from the risk of a prison sentence that he feared would kill her.

Only this week – 14 years after appearing in a Scottish court – was his conviction finally quashed. Ravinder cried when he learned he had been exonerated but any relief he feels is tempered by the fury at what his family have endured – and what he knows others still endure.

As he says: ‘If someone abuses you for ten years then stops, are you grateful? No, you are furious.

‘It’s not just the postmaster or sub-postmaster that suffers [when the accusation lands] – everyone who works there struggles to get a job that involves handling money. Families are torn apart.’

At its heart, the Naga family story is one of hard work, as Ravinder and Gurbash explain to me from their shared home in Scotland.

Three of Ravinder’s grandparents were orphans and they instilled a determination in their children that has passed down generations.

Gurbash came to the UK from India aged seven and Mohan was 12; they eventually married and started their family – Ravinder has a younger sister – in Birmingham. Mohan worked as a welder and had begun training to be an electrician when he got the opportunity to run a shop in Scotland.

Ravinder was six when the family moved north but his childhood experiences left scars. ‘There was only one other Asian family in the area,’ he says.

There was some shocking racism and one of his deepest regrets about the Post Office nightmare is that his financial stability was derailed just at the point when he and his wife were looking to move to give their own children a different upbringing.

Still, in so many ways Mohan and Gurbash made it a success. They built up their shop, opened a restaurant, a key repair shop and then in 1994 the opportunity to buy the post office came along. It was Ravinder, then 19, who saw that it was for sale.

But five years later Mohan died suddenly after developing a blood clot in his eye.

‘An ambulance took him to hospital and I went to make sure he was settled,’ says Ravinder. ‘The last conversation I had with him, he made me promise that no matter what, I’d always look after my mum and my sister. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m just honouring my promises.’

The loss was a heavy blow to the family. There was no life insurance and, at 44, Gurbash wasn’t entitled to any of her late husband’s pension contributions, so work kept them all going.

But everything crumbled again on March 26, 2009, when a ‘woman from the Post Office’ arrived in Belville Street to count the cash in the safe.

When she finished, she asked ‘is there any more?’

Gurbash was scrupulous about making sure all her accounting matched up, right down to the very last stamp –a habit she instilled in everyone she worked with. ‘Any shortfall, any discrepancy was something you were always on the lookout for,’ she says. ‘You knew the repercussions if the figures didn’t match.’

During the six years she had presided over her post office before the introduction of the Horizon system, she says there were rarely any problems with accounting, but after it was brought in there was an inexplicable rise in the number of times hiccups in the numbers would necessitate her to call for IT assistance.

Now we know the Horizon system had bugs that caused phantom shortfalls, but then, when asked whether there was more money unaccounted for, her heart sank.

Her worst fears were realised when a team of auditors arrived within hours of the first woman from the Post Office and pronounced they had found a ‘shortfall’ of more than £30,000.

Gurbash, a woman who had twice found herself confronted by robbers as she worked at the post office counter, knew she had not made any errors. Even so, panic descended.

‘It was like I had dropped down a manhole,’ she says.

She immediately called Ravinder, who then had a two-year-old son and a wife pregnant with their second child. He was horrified to arrive and see his mother in such anguish. ‘To see my mum standing there like a lost child; I hadn’t seen that before and we have been through a lot.’

Instinctively, he did the only thing he felt he could. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her.

‘Worst come to worst, if anything happens, I’m going to take the blame for it.’

Never did he imagine that he would end up doing just that.

He can’t pinpoint precisely when he realised he was going to have to take his false confession all the way to court, but it came after he and his sister could find no plausible explanation for what had happened.

‘The only way £35,000 could have been missing was if it was embezzled over time, but I knew my mum would never have done that. She had no need to do that because we were earning good money. We had two businesses, plus we had property rented out.

‘We tried to find out where the money went. We examined every single avenue; then when my sister looked up online and saw that postmasters were going to jail left, right and centre – that’s when we thought, hold on a minute, there’s no way out of this.

‘At the end of the day, somebody’s going to have to take the blame for this.’

The humiliation of having their good name questioned had already had a huge impact on the family and they felt forced to close their businesses straight after the auditors had visited.

Ravinder was terrified about the impact the stress of it all was having on his mother and his pregnant wife.

So when Gurbash was later taken into police custody for questioning, Ravinder, afraid she wouldn’t survive a prison sentence, made a confession that seems preposterous as he details it now.

He said he had gone to take his mum lunch, then while her back was turned siphoned away the cash from the post office safe and into a bag – despite the fact the safe security system was programmed to only allow entry after a 40-minute delay.

‘I’m not a genius, but I managed to crack a safe in basically ten seconds, fill a bag and walk out.’

Why was the plausibility of his account not probed? ‘They just wanted someone to carry the can,’ he says.

In 2010, Ravinder turned up at court with £35,000 he had hastily borrowed from his uncle to repay the ‘loss’ and walked out a convicted thief with an order to complete 300 hours of community service. But the real sentence came after. ‘When your reputation is that you are a thief and not just a thief, but one who stole from your own mum, people aren’t rushing to hire you,’ says Ravinder.

‘I had been working since I was a child. I had built these businesses with my parents, but I had my own business interests too. I had a property portfolio I was building. But how can I go to the bank? How can I get people to trust me after that? All my investors walked away from me.’

After his conviction Ravinder – who had once been able to afford to pay for his family to holiday in India for six weeks a year – had to take any job he could, knowing where suspicions would fall if there was ever money short.

His sister helped him find work in a business centre – manning the reception desk by day, then cleaning the building by night.

‘Imagine,’ implores Ravinder. ‘You’ve got yourself in a decent position and then you’re sitting in the reception of a little business centre and when everyone goes home you are cleaning up their p*** and s***.’

The impact was hard on everyone. Most stark was the change wrought on Gurbash, who overnight went from strong businesswoman to stay-at-home grandmother.

‘When I stopped at the post office, I could have gone out to work. I was experienced enough to find work, but I just didn’t want to work among people,’ she says.

Why not? ‘The stigma,’ she explains sadly. ‘It was hanging over us, every one of us felt it.’

She has also had to wrestle with the enormity of what her son did.

‘I think he just took the responsibility for thinking he could handle things better than me at that time,’ she says, regretfully.

Never did Gurbash think her son would go to court. She thought she would resign, the cash would be returned and that would be it.

‘It was very hard. I did feel guilty. I did regret ever buying that post office.’

The shop, which the family still own, remained an agonising presence in their lives, boarded up, and a place Ravinder and his wife had to pass every day on the school run.

‘We used to tell the kids that used to be Granny’s post office. They obviously didn’t know the full story then. They do now.’

This week, mother and son prised open the locks and returned for the first time, uncovering a dusty time warp of what once was. Since 2009 the nature of the entire street has changed – shops closed, flats empty.

‘It was the hub of the community,’ says Ravinder sadly of the family’s defunct business.

‘They killed the whole community,’ he says, clearly referring to the Post Office.

It was about five years ago when Ravinder caught a whisper of cases being reviewed.

The cause was given a boost earlier this year when Mr Bates vs The Post Office struck a chord with the nation, raising awareness of the plight of so many former postmasters and mistresses. As Ravinder drily points out: ‘We’re just lucky that the programme was so well made. Imagine it was a mediocre programme?’

It was the Post Office who referred his case to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, but as he was not the postmaster or sub-postmaster, it was far from clear cut that he would be exonerated in legislation passed by the Scottish parliament to automatically clear victims of the Horizon scandal.

Ravinder gives credit to his solicitor Greg Cunningham and his family, for the fact he didn’t give up.

As for what he did, he says: ‘It’s my mum. I know, people are going on [saying] what I’ve done is supposed to be something amazing, but to me any human being who wouldn’t look after another person who’s vulnerable should be ashamed of themselves.’

There has been no compensation yet for the Naga family, nor have they seen any of the £35,000 they repaid.

But Ravinder’s thoughts are not on cash, rather on those who suffered and suffer still.

‘It’s not about the fact that we had the strength to rebuild or that we had the strength to carry on,’ he says sadly. ‘What about all the people who couldn’t?’

A Post Office spokesman said: ‘We are truly sorry for the suffering caused by the Post Office’s past actions. We are doing all we can to help victims get answers and to put things right.’

But, understandably, Ravinder’s anger remains visceral.

‘They took normal, happy people and took them to the point where even painkillers and alcohol wouldn’t numb their pain.

‘We owe it to the others to speak up. If it helps one person find a bit of strength to get through this, then it’s been worthwhile.’