Snow, Gareth

Gareth Snow had been the sub-postmaster of the Corwen Post Office branch in Denbighshire. An audit of this branch took place in November 2000 after which Mr Snow was interviewed by Post Office Ltd (POL) investigators and charged with three counts of false accounting.  

The prosecution alleged that he had falsified documents for accounting purposes, which must have been to cover a loss on the figures of £57,534.75.  

He pleaded guilty on all counts of false accounting on 13 July 2001 at Caernarfon Crown Court and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. 

In 2021 Mr Snow applied for leave to appeal his conviction but later abandoned the appeal. An application to the CCRC was submitted in March 2023.  

Mr Snow’s Post Office branch used the Post Office’s Automatic Payment Service (APS) and Automatic Payment Terminal (APT), which consisted of an electronic terminal connected to the telephone lines used to carry out transactions such as rent, rates, and utility bills. Mr Snow would include a record of these transactions in his manual account ledger. 

Whilst Mr Snow admitted that he falsified accounts, he said that that was because errors caused by the APT had resulted in merely accounting shortfalls.  

Following a detailed review, the CCRC decided that there was a real possibility the Court of Appeal would find Mr Snow’s conviction unsafe, notwithstanding his guilty plea, and quash it.  

In reaching this conclusion, the CCRC considered the Court’s judgment in the Horizon case of Hamilton & Ors v Post Office Ltd [2021], and reflected on that as a guide to the correct approach to other cases based on potentially unreliable data from Post Office systems. There were real similarities between Hamilton and Mr Snow’s case. 

There was evidence that the APS/APT could cause accounting errors. Whilst Mr Snow did not raise issues about the APS/APT at the time, accounting shortfalls were occurring that he could not explain. There appeared to be no indication that POL made any attempt to investigate other possible causes. 

The CCRC referred the conviction in November 2025.