This is a CSS code block that defines a font family called “Guardian Headline Full” with multiple font weights and styles. It includes:
– Light (weight 300) in normal and italic styles
– Regular (weight 400) in normal and italic styles
– Medium (weight 500) in normal and italic styles
– Semibold (weight 600) in normal and italic styles
Each font face is loaded from the Guardian’s asset server using three file formats: WOFF2, WOFF, and TTF, to ensure compatibility across different browsers.This text appears to be CSS code, not natural language. It defines font styles and layout rules for a webpage. Since it’s technical code, rewriting it into “fluent, natural English” isn’t applicable—it’s already in a precise, standardized format. However, I can provide a plain-English summary of what it does:
The code sets up custom fonts for a website, including various weights and styles of the “Guardian Headline” and “Guardian Titlepiece” fonts, using different file formats for compatibility. It also includes responsive design rules for a content column, adjusting margins and widths based on screen size, and ensuring certain elements like images or videos display correctly across devices. For example, on larger screens, the main column shifts right, and on smaller screens, full-width elements stretch to fit the screen edge. The code also limits text and list widths to 620 pixels for readability..content__main-column–interactive:before {
border-left: 1px solid #dcdcdc;
z-index: -1;
left: -10px;
}
@media (min-width: 81.25em) {
.content__main-column–interactive:before {
border-left: 1px solid #dcdcdc;
left: -11px;
}
}
.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom {
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
padding-bottom: 12px;
padding-top: 12px;
}
.content__main-column–interactive p + .element-atom {
padding-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0;
margin-top: 12px;
margin-bottom: 12px;
}
.content__main-column–interactive .element-inline {
max-width: 620px;
}
@media (min-width: 61.25em) {
figure[data-spacefinder-role=”inline”].element {
max-width: 620px;
}
}
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) figure.loop figcaption:not(.hidden) {
z-index: 6;
}
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) figure.loop button[data-link-name*=”gu-video-loop”] {
align-self: flex-end;
margin-bottom: 40px;
margin-right: 3px;
}
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) figure.loop .controls-container div:has(button[data-testid=”unmute-icon”]),
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) figure.loop .controls-container div:has(button[data-testid=”mute-icon”]) {
right: 0;
padding-left: 10px;
}
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) #caption-button {
z-index: 100;
}
@media (min-width: 61.25em) {
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.loop) #caption-button {
bottom: 20px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 46.25em) {
[data-gu-name=”media”]:has(figure.cinemagraph) .cinemagraph > div {
max-height: unset;
}
}
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”] {
width: 100%;
max-width: 620px;
display: block;
margin-top: 12px;
margin-bottom: 12px;
}
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”] figure.loop,
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”] figure.loop video {
width: 100%;
height: auto;
max-width: 620px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) {
max-width: unset;
margin: 12px 0;
}
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) figure.loop,
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) figure.loop video {
max-width: unset;
margin: 0;
}
@media (min-width: 71.25em) {
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) {
width: 1140px;
margin-left: -180px;
}
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) figure figcaption {
margin-left: 20px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 81.25em) {
[data-gu-name=”body”] gu-island[name=”SelfHostedVideo”]:has(figure.loop.element-video-immersive) {
width: 1300px;
margin-left: -260px;
}
}
:root {
–dateline: #606060;
–headerBorder: #dcdcdc;
–captionText: #999;
–captionBackground: hsla(0, 0%, 7%, .72);
–feature: #c70000;
–new-pillar-colour: var(–primary-pillar, var(–feature));
}
:root:root {
–subheading-text: var(–secondary-pillar);
–pullquote-text: var(–secondary-pillar);
–pullquote-icon: var(–secondary-pillar);
–block-quote-text: var(–article-text);
}
:root:root blockquote {
–block-quote-fill: var(–secondary-pillar);
}
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
:root:root:not([data-color-scheme=”light”]) {
–subheading-text: var(–darkmode-pillar);
–pullquote-text: var(–darkmode-pillar);
–pullquote-icon: var(–darkmode-pillar);
}
:root:root:not([data-color-scheme=”light”]) blockquote {
–block-quote-fill: var(–darkmode-pillar);
}
}
.content__main-column–interactive .element.element-atom,
.element.element-atom {
padding: 0;
}
.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom:first-of-type + p:first-of-type,
.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom:first-of-type + .sign-in-gate + p:first-of-type,
.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom:first-of-type + #sign-in-gate + p:first-of-type,
.content__main-column–interactive .element-atom:first-of-type + .element-atom + p:first-of-type,
.content__main-column–interactive hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule) + p,
.content__main-column–interactive hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule) + .ad-slot-container + p,
#article-body > div .element-atom:first-of-type + p:first-of-type,
#article-body > div .element-atom:first-of-type + .sign-in-gate + p:first-of-type,
#article-body > div .element-atom:first-of-type + #sign-in-gate + p:first-of-type,
#article-body > div .element-atom:first-of-type + .element-atom + p:first-of-type,
#article-body > div hr {
/ No specific styles defined here; the selector list is left as is. /
}The first paragraph after a horizontal rule or an element atom should have extra space at the top. This applies to the first paragraph that follows any of these elements, whether it comes directly after the element or after an ad slot container. The same rule applies across different sections of the page, including the main article body, interactive content, comment sections, and feature sections.
Additionally, the first letter of that first paragraph should be styled in a special way. This drop cap effect applies to the first paragraph after a horizontal rule or element atom, whether it appears directly after the element or after an ad slot container, across all the same sections of the page.[data-gu-name=body] .element-atom:first-of-type+.element-atom+p:first-of-type:first-letter,
[data-gu-name=body] hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule)+p:first-letter,
[data-gu-name=body] hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule)+.ad-slot-container+p:first-letter,
#feature-body .element-atom:first-of-type+p:first-of-type:first-letter,
#feature-body .element-atom:first-of-type+.sign-in-gate+p:first-of-type:first-letter,
#feature-body .element-atom:first-of-type+#sign-in-gate+p:first-of-type:first-letter,
#feature-body .element-atom:first-of-type+.element-atom+p:first-of-type:first-letter,
#feature-body hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule)+p:first-letter,
#feature-body hr:not(.last-horizontal-rule)+.ad-slot-container+p:first-letter {
font-family: Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Guardian Headline Full, Georgia, serif;
font-weight: 700;
font-size: 111px;
line-height: 92px;
float: left;
text-transform: uppercase;
box-sizing: border-box;
margin-right: 8px;
vertical-align: text-top;
color: var(–drop-cap, var(–new-pillar-colour));
}
.content__main-column–interactive hr+p,
.content__main-column–interactive hr+.ad-slot-container+p,
#article-body>div hr+p,
#article-body>div hr+.ad-slot-container+p,
.content–interactive>div hr+p,
.content–interactive>div hr+.ad-slot-container+p,
#comment-body hr+p,
#comment-body hr+.ad-slot-container+p,
[data-gu-name=body] hr+p,
[data-gu-name=body] hr+.ad-slot-container+p,
#feature-body hr+p,
#feature-body hr+.ad-slot-container+p {
padding-top: 0;
}
.content__main-column–interactive [data-gu-name=pullquote],
#article-body>div [data-gu-name=pullquote],
.content–interactive>div [data-gu-name=pullquote],
#comment-body [data-gu-name=pullquote],
[data-gu-name=body] [data-gu-name=pullquote],
#feature-body [data-gu-name=pullquote] {
max-width: 620px;
}
#maincontent figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#feature-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#standard-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#comment-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption {
position: static !important;
width: 100%;
max-width: 620px;
}
@media (min-width: 71.25em) {
#maincontent figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#feature-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#standard-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#comment-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption {
position: absolute !important;
max-width: 140px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 81.25em) {
#maincontent figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#feature-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#standard-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption,
#comment-article-container figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase figcaption {
max-width: 220px;
}
}
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive {
width: calc(100vw – var(–scrollbar-width, 0px));
}
@media (max-width: 71.24em) {
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive {
max-width: 978px;
}
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive figcaption {
padding-inline: 10px;
}
}
@media (max-width: 71.24em) and (min-width: 30em) {
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive figcaption {
padding-inline: 20px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 46.25em) and (max-width: 61.24em) {
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive {
max-width: 738px;
}
}
@media (max-width: 46.24em) {
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive {
margin-left: -10px !important;
margin-right: 0 !important;
left: 0;
}
}
@media (max-width: 46.24em) and (min-width: 30em) {
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive {
margin-left: -20px !important;
}
.element.element–immersive.element-immersive figcaption {
padding-inline: 20px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 71.25em) {
[data-gu-name=body] figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase,
[data-gu-name=body] .content__main-column–interactive figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase {
margin-left: -160px !important;
}
}
@media (min-width: 81.25em) {
[data-gu-name=body] figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase,
[data-gu-n[class=”body”] .content__main-column–interactive figure.element.element–showcase.element-showcase {
margin-left: -240px !important;
}
.furniture-wrapper {
position: relative;
}
@media (min-width: 61.25em) {
.furniture-wrapper {
display: grid;
grid-column-gap: 20px;
grid-row-gap: 0px;
grid-template-columns: [title-start headline-start meta-start standfirst-start] repeat(5, 1fr) [title-end headline-end meta-end standfirst-end portrait-start] repeat(5, 1fr) [portrait-end];
grid-template-rows: [title-start portrait-start] .25fr [title-end headline-start] 1fr [headline-end standfirst-start] .75fr [standfirst-end meta-start] auto [meta-end portrait-end];
}
.furniture-wrapper #headline > div:first-child,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”headline”] > div:first-child,
.furniture-wrapper .headline > div:first-child {
border-top: 1px solid var(–headerBorder);
}
.furniture-wrapper #meta,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”meta”] {
position: relative;
padding-top: 2px;
margin-right: 0;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst .content__standfirst,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst .content__standfirst,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] .content__standfirst {
margin-bottom: 4px;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst ul li,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst ul li,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] ul li {
font-size: 20px;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst li a,
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst a,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst li a,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst a,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] li a,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] a {
border-bottom: none;
background-image: none !important;
text-decoration: underline;
text-underline-offset: 6px;
text-decoration-color: var(–headerBorder, #dcdcdc);
text-decoration-thickness: 1px;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst li a:hover,
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst a:hover,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst li a:hover,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst a:hover,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] li a:hover,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] a:hover {
text-decoration-color: var(–new-pillar-colour);
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst p:first-of-type,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst p:first-of-type,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] p:first-of-type {
border-top: 1px solid var(–headerBorder);
padding-bottom: 0;
}
}
@media (min-width: 61.25em) and (min-width: 71.25em) {
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst p:first-of-type,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst p:first-of-type,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] p:first-of-type {
border-top: unset;
}
}
@media (min-width: 61.25em) {
.furniture-wrapper figure {
margin: 0 0 0 -10px;
}
.furniture-wrapper figure[data-spacefinder-role=”inline”].element {
max-width: 630px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 71.25em) {
.furniture-wrapper {
grid-template-columns: [title-start headline-start meta-start] repeat(2, 1fr) [meta-end standfirst-start] repeat(5, 1fr) [title-end headline-end standfirst-end portrait-start] repeat(7, 1fr) [portrait-end];
grid-template-rows: [title-start portrait-start] 80px [title-end headline-start] auto [headline-end standfirst-start meta-start] auto [standfirst-end meta-end portrait-end];
}
.furniture-wrapper #meta:before,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”meta”]:before {
content: “”;
width: 540px;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
background-color: var(–headerBorder);
height: 1px;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst p,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst p,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”] p {
border-top: unset;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst:before,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst:before,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”]:before {
content: “”;
width: 1px;
background-color: var(–headerBorder);
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: .5px;
}
}
@media (min-width: 81.25em) {
.furniture-wrapper {
grid-template-columns: [title-start headline-start meta-start] repeat(3, 1fr) [meta-end standfirst-start] repeat(5, 1fr) [title-end headline-end standfirst-end portrait-start] repeat(8, 1fr) [portrait-end];
grid-template-rows: [title-start portrait-start] .25fr [title-end headline-start] 1fr [headline-end standfirst-start meta-start] .75fr [standfirst-end meta-end portrait-end];
}
.furniture-wrapper #meta:before,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”meta”]:before {
width: 620px;
}
.furniture-wrapper .standfirst:before,
.furniture-wrapper #standfirst:before,
.furniture-wrapper [data-gu-name=”standfirst”]:before {
/ No additional styles specified here /
}
}Here’s the rewritten text in fluent, natural English:
The furniture wrapper styles adjust the layout and appearance of article headers, standfirsts, and media elements. The standfirst section has a small left offset and padding, with a subtle line on the left side. On larger screens, it gets a bit more top padding. The headline text is bold, with a maximum width of 620 pixels and a font size of 32 pixels, which increases to 50 pixels on very wide screens while narrowing the width to 540 pixels.
The decorative lines (keyline-4) are hidden on medium and large screens, but when visible, they use a stroke color defined by a CSS variable. The meta section (which includes social sharing and comments) has no right margin on medium screens, and its borders match the header border color. Some interactive elements in the meta section are hidden.
The main media area is positioned relative, with no top margin and a small bottom margin. It spans the full width on mobile devices, with a slight left offset that adjusts based on screen size. The caption is placed at the bottom of the media, with a semi-transparent background and text color, and it includes a button to toggle visibility. The caption text has a specific color for its border and icons, and the first part of the caption is hidden while the second part is shown.
On very wide screens, the main column has a slightly extended top and bottom border. Headings within the interactive content are limited to a maximum width of 620 pixels. In dark mode, certain text and link colors are adjusted to use lighter shades and pillar colors for better readability.I’m sorry, but I can’t help with rewriting this text as it appears to be CSS code, not natural language prose. If you have a different text you’d like me to rephrase, feel free to share it.Here is the rewritten text in fluent, natural English:
When hovering over links in the standfirst or list items, remove the bottom border and use the new pillar color for the underline. The standfirst paragraphs should be light gray. On screens wider than 61.25em, add a top border to the first paragraph, but remove it on screens wider than 71.25em. List items in the standfirst are also light gray. On larger screens, add a background color and border to the left and right sides of the furniture wrapper, adjusting the width based on the viewport size. The keyline and social media icons should use the header border color. Headings in the article body are light weight, but become bold if they contain strong text. For apps, set specific colors for follow text, icons, standfirst text and links, bylines, and article meta lines. The byline should use the new pillar color, and the follow wrapper should have a subtle background image.Leicestershire police won’t say who first tipped them off about Jigar Gheewala, but it’s easy to see why, once they heard about him, they wanted to dig deeper. Gheewala was unemployed, had no obvious income, yet lived in a £1.3 million house and sent his three kids to private school. “He was a declared bankrupt, with a bank account that didn’t match what it should have been at all,” said Laura Panter, a financial crime supervisor with Leicestershire police’s economic crime team. “That’s where we started.”
Over the course of 2020, even though he was on benefits, Gheewala’s bank account received more than £880,000 in cash, spread across 200 separate deposits. As it turned out, he was a money launderer—but not the kind you’d see in the movies. His deposits weren’t made in Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands; they were made at various post office branches in Leicester, one thick stack of banknotes after another.
As banks have shut branches across Britain, post offices have quietly become central to how we handle our money. In 2017, post offices started accepting deposits on behalf of banks, and those deposits now top £30 billion a year. The process is simple: a customer hands over banknotes to be counted, then inserts a bank card and enters their PIN, like a cash machine in reverse. The post office system then talks to the bank’s system, which credits the cash value to the account linked to the card.
It’s a straightforward setup, and Post Office Ltd—the state-owned company that runs the branches—says it provides a vital service for businesses and individuals who’d otherwise be cut off from banking. But that simplicity comes with a downside. It’s removed many of the checks that used to stop criminals from washing their cash. Just as you can use someone else’s card to withdraw money from an ATM if you know the PIN, you can use any bank card to make a deposit at a post office. The process is deliberately streamlined, and unlike at a bank, the post office worker (often called a postmaster or subpostmaster) has no way to see any account details. So they can’t check if the person holding the card is the actual owner, or whether the transaction fits a suspicious pattern.
Law enforcement agencies estimate that, alongside legitimate business takings, hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty money are being paid into post offices each year. This lets drug dealers and other criminals bank their illegal wealth, profit from their crimes, and do it with minimal effort. “The number of places where cash can enter the economy is huge now, but as bank branches keep closing, the places to pay it back in have become more limited. You’ve got this sort of reverse funnel effect,” said a former Post Office employee with knowledge of how it handles financial services. “The bad guys are genuinely targeting post offices as one of the few spots left where they can actually go to deposit money.”
Leicestershire police used Gheewala’s transactions to piece together how he worked. On a typical day, he might make his first cash deposit in the east of the city, at a post office counter inside a convenience store. Then it’d be a five-minute drive to another store, with boxes of vegetables out front and windows covered in decals for soft drinks and spirits, offering post office services alongside scratchcards. A few minutes away was another branch, squeezed between a chemist and a fried chicken shop. Another short drive would take him to a retail centre where the post office sat next to a bakery on a nice-looking residential street. A final drive north would bring him to a convenience store among red-brick detached houses—and that was a morning’s work done: thousands of pounds deposited in about an hour, bundles of criminal cash flowing into the most ordinary of places.When we first started looking into this, we noticed other people in Leicestershire doing the exact same thing,” said Panter. “We found a very consistent pattern in how cash was being deposited at post offices.”
Panter and her team’s work became known as Operation Kilo. It started in 2021 and wrapped up in December 2025, when Gheewala was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison, along with six others who helped him. And this wasn’t just happening in Leicester. Officers watched couriers arrive from London and Yorkshire carrying bags full of cash that criminals had earned, dropping them off at shops for Gheewala’s crew to collect. Each day’s money was split among a group of lower-level workers, who then went around the city’s post offices, paying in stacks of banknotes held together with rubber bands. At each stop, they’d deposit into as many as 10 different accounts, using cards with the PINs written on the back.
The accounts receiving the money belonged to regular people—what police call “mules”—who got small payments for letting their accounts be used, or to companies in Leicester’s garment trade, where managers made up fake invoices to make the payments look legitimate. (Gheewala promised the mules £50 for every £10,000 laundered, but in reality, he often paid them less.) Gheewala ran the whole operation from a laptop kept in an empty house, with all the account details and passwords written down in a notebook. As soon as the money showed up online, he’d use cryptocurrency exchanges to send it around the world.
Over two years, Gheewala’s group moved an incredible £53 million, letting organised criminals clean their money on a massive scale. It’s unclear exactly how much Gheewala charged for his services, but judging by his lifestyle, he was making a good living from it.
His operation was big, but it wasn’t unique. Just a month after Gheewala was convicted, two men were jailed in Birmingham for a nearly identical scheme, paying in up to £200,000 a day as they moved between 10 post offices in the east of the city. In April, a man from Cheltenham was jailed for six years and eight months for running a network of mules who paid millions in cash into post offices in Bristol and Gloucestershire.
And this has been going on for years. Two men were jailed at Southwark Crown Court in 2024 for paying £26 million into post offices in London and Manchester before their arrests in 2017. Students have been jailed in Scotland for paying criminal money into post offices, and there are other ongoing cases with similar allegations.
If it weren’t for what’s been happening elsewhere in the Post Office, this would be a major story. Instead, it’s been mostly ignored.
The Post Office Horizon scandal came to public attention thanks to the 2024 ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, but it had been going on for two decades before that. Post Office Ltd wrongly prosecuted hundreds of its post office operators, even though senior staff knew the computer program that supposedly showed fraud was faulty. Former post office operator Alan Bates’s landmark victory against his former employers in 2019 forced the government to overturn his and others’ convictions and promise to pay hundreds of millions in compensation.
The scandal is one of Britain’s worst miscarriages of justice. One unfortunate side effect is that it’s slowed down investigations into how much money is being laundered through post office branches. Even if police are confident that figures from Post Office Ltd’s Horizon software (a version of which is still in use) are reliable, they know many jury members will—understandably—be very sceptical. Documents released by the inquiry into the Horizon scandal show that in 2024, just a few weeks afterAfter the ITV drama first aired, a detective constable from Blackburn police station decided to stop an investigation into “large-scale money laundering, and possibly other fraud offences” involving post office branches in Lancashire. The reason? He was worried that defence lawyers would find it too easy to discredit evidence that came from the computer system.
View image in fullscreen
Jigar Gheewala, who was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison for money laundering. Photograph: Leicestershire Police
“After the Mr Bates TV show, it became a real hot potato and nobody wanted to touch it,” said one officer, who asked to remain anonymous. “For every case that’s brought forward, there are many more behind the scenes. There’s no real willingness to act unless it’s a clear-cut case, because the public supports the post office operatives.” So the problem persists. “The issue is that you can deposit money into the post office without any checks—that’s the problem. It’s huge.”
If you look at the raw numbers, you can see his point. In October 2020, cash deposits at post office branches across the UK totalled £1.9 billion. That’s £1.9 billion for just that one month, not the whole year. The following October, the figure was £2.2 billion. That number kept climbing each year until, by October 2025, it reached £2.9 billion—a 50% increase in just five years. Although Post Office Ltd then stopped publishing such detailed figures, the trend has continued. It boasted of a 10% rise in deposits in the first quarter of this year, meaning they have now almost certainly passed £3 billion a month.
What makes these numbers so striking is that over the same period, cash usage among the general public has dropped sharply. Cash now accounts for fewer than one in ten transactions in the UK. Yet cash deposits at the post office have moved sharply in the opposite direction.
According to Post Office Ltd, the reason it stopped publishing monthly cash totals last year was that its post office operatives didn’t want to alert criminals to how much money they had on the premises. Branches are vulnerable to theft for the same reason they’re wide open to money laundering. They’re often just ordinary shops offering post office services over the counter, and they lack the specialised equipment that would allow them to track who’s on the premises or keep their employees safe.
Back when Post Office Ltd was still publishing its monthly cash figures, it would accompany them with upbeat quotes about how much it was helping small businesses by providing banking services. While much of the increase is certainly driven by the closure of bank branches, a senior police officer would regularly forward the figures to me, accompanied by a single emoji: 👀.
Concerns about being seen to further victimise post office operatives have discouraged police officers from going on the record about the scale of the problem they’re seeing. “I’m sure you appreciate that anything quotable is going to have to be suitably bland,” another senior officer told me. “It would need to be, you know, ‘we work in partnership’, ‘there are many perspectives’-type stuff.”
The sensitivity is understandable, but it comes with dangers. By making it possible for organised criminals—drug dealers, human traffickers, thieves, fraudsters, and others—to launder their earnings and keep their profits, the post office risks creating an entirely different scandal.
The trial of Giuseppe Sangiovanni and seven of his alleged co-conspirators was due to start in May 2025 at Bristol Crown Court and run for several days. Sangiovanni was accused of running a scheme that laundered £2.2 million via post office branches in Bristol and Gloucestershire over a few months in 2021. His alleged co-conspirators were accused of letting him move money through their bank accounts in return for small payments.
On the first morning of the trial, however, Sangiovanni changed his plea to guilty and left the courtroom to await a fresh hearing, leaving his co-defendants behind. It quickly became…It was clear they were not criminal masterminds. I had only just arrived in Bristol and knew just the basics of the case, but even I could see their chances of avoiding conviction were now almost zero. If the prosecutors had all the transaction records, and the ringleader was pleading guilty, then the owners of the bank accounts the money had passed through would find it nearly impossible to convince a jury that nothing suspicious had happened.
Technically, a trial was still scheduled, but it was so obviously not going to happen that the jury never even entered the courtroom. The two prosecution lawyers, far from preparing for the new situation, were using the break to chat about holiday spots for their unexpected free time. The only people there who didn’t seem to grasp what Sangiovanni’s decision meant were his co-defendants, who kept sitting in the dock like baby birds in smart casual clothes, with only a vague idea of what was going on.
The judge tried to help, encouraging them to talk things over with their lawyers. They whispered among themselves, until one by one – over many hours, and after several hearings were called, paused, and called again – they also changed their pleas to guilty. (They weren’t masterminds, as I said, and most got suspended sentences.)
“They’re just run-of-the-mill local criminals. A couple of them weren’t really criminals at all. One we didn’t charge was a single mum and, to some extent, was taken advantage of,” said Detective Inspector Peter Highway of the south west regional organised crime unit. It was only during a police interview that one defendant found out Sangiovanni had laundered over £1m through his bank account. “He was a bit surprised by that number,” said Highway, “because he hadn’t made the deposits himself.”
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The cast of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, broadcast on ITV in 2024. Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock
Money laundering was made a crime in the UK in 1988 as part of a global push to close gaps in the financial system that let criminals keep their profits. Before that, it was easy for criminals to walk into a bank and pay in cash without any questions, but the new laws required bankers to report suspicious transactions to law enforcement. The idea was that, with bankers sending in a steady flow of suspicious activity reports, police could spot money being laundered as it happened, freeze it, and arrest those responsible.
The world has moved on since then, and the most sophisticated crime, like fraud, involves electronic money stolen from people’s bank accounts and moved in a wide range of ways, using shell companies, cryptocurrencies, secrecy havens, and more. This needs equally advanced countermeasures from banks, which use AI-powered tools to detect signs of criminal behaviour.
At the street level, though, not much has changed: criminals still use cash, and the National Crime Agency estimates they launder about £12bn worth of banknotes in the UK each year, mostly by passing the money off as earnings from legitimate businesses. This is where post office branches come in.
From the criminals’ point of view, post offices are quick and easy places to launder dirty money. “There’s no requirement for ID verification, no requirement for any kind of enhanced screening, and no centralised CCTV,” said the second senior police officer. We set a higher bar for buying alcohol than we do for money laundering through the post office.
This is why Gheewala’s mules could walk into a branch with a pocket full of bank cards and pay bundles of cash into multiple accounts, one after another. “You definitely don’t want, in a post office that already has queues out the door, to have a complicated financial transaction going on. So everything the post office does for banking is designed with simplicity in mind,” said the former Post Office employee.The problem, as seen in Leicester, is that criminals move money out of bank accounts as soon as it lands. Any reports post office staff make about suspicious transactions come too late for banks to freeze the funds. This undermines the UK’s entire anti-money-laundering strategy, which has always depended on blocking suspicious transactions while investigators look into them.
The criminal opportunities created by Post Office Ltd’s move into banking were quickly apparent. In July 2020, the Post Office’s compliance committee flagged £7 million in questionable deposits across 45 branches. By November that year, it noted that £5-7 million a week was being deposited at just two branches in east London, and said it was discussing with banks what steps to take.
Sangiovanni and his co-defendants ran into this kind of scrutiny after bank compliance officers spotted millions of pounds in suspicious cash transactions at 27 post offices around Gloucestershire. They alerted the police, who first brought in the money mules, then Sangiovanni, for questioning. “He said he would go to a car park at Asda, someone would hand him a carrier bag full of cash, and he would take it away and then send them some crypto,” said Highway. “He didn’t see that as suspicious. We did.”
But by the time officers from the south west organised crime unit moved in, the money was long gone. So, although they caught Sangiovanni, the criminals whose cash he was laundering got to enjoy the cleaned funds. “Millions of pounds into the laundering, that’s a bit late in the day,” said Highway.
The fix for this gap in our defences against dirty money seems obvious. If the Post Office is going to operate like a bank, it should collect the same kind of information, make the same kind of reports, and freeze transactions just as banks do. In 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took a small step in that direction by imposing limits on how much cash could be deposited at the post office at any one time. It was a logical move, but it sparked immediate controversy.
With two-thirds of bank branches closing in the UK over the past decade, businesses and individuals who still rely on cash have become heavily dependent on post-office branches to deposit their takings. Post Office Ltd pushed back against the FCA’s deposit limits, arguing they were penalising hard-pressed businesses just trying to stay afloat. “They are hurting legitimate customers and businesses who need support,” said Ross Borkett, Post Office Ltd’s then-head of banking, after the FCA’s changes were announced. Cash-intensive businesses, through groups like the British Independent Retailers Association and the Independent Retail Consortium, launched a lobbying campaign, writing to their MPs, who then held parliamentary debates to highlight how few bank branches remained in their constituencies.
As a result, ministers promised to ensure that businesses and individuals still reliant on banknotes and coins would always be able to use them. In other words, the FCA’s cash limit is likely to be the last attempt to make post office payments harder.
At a time when a growing share of the population can’t access a physical bank branch, the UK’s 11,500 post-office branches will become even more central to any strategy for keeping banknotes usable. Moving, securing, and accepting cash is expensive, which is one reason banks no longer want to do it. Post offices don’t charge customers for deposits, though, so who will foot the bill?
The answer to that question is tied up in the legacy of the Horizon scandal. Post Office Ltd was already in significantIt was already struggling financially before it had to start compensating the hundreds of post office operators it had wrongly prosecuted. Now, it has paid out over £1 billion, pushing it into a major annual loss. That alone is a serious threat to its long-term survival, but it’s only half the problem. Post office branches run as independent businesses, yet the income operators earned from providing post office services dropped by nearly 5% in the decade leading up to 2023, partly because fewer people are sending letters. At the same time, their costs have gone up. So Post Office Ltd not only has to find the money to compensate the operators it wronged, but it also has to come up with a sustainable business model if it wants people to keep running post offices at all. And that’s where banking comes in.
Banks pay Post Office Ltd to handle services on their behalf, which helped it bring in £309 million from “banking and ATMs” in its 2024-25 accounts. That made up more than a third of its revenue that year, and was only slightly less than what it earned from handling mail. In fact, Post Office Ltd might already be making more money from deposits and withdrawals than from its traditional business. As one former insider joked: “We should start calling it the Bank Office.”
This matters not just for Post Office Ltd, but also for individual operators, who get a fee for every cash deposit they handle. “The post office operators will be paid based on the transactions that go through their branch, so they get a transaction fee,” Ben Woollard, the new head of banking at Post Office Ltd, told me. “Like with any product, the more a post office operator or any business delivers, the more income they earn from it.”
Woollard argues that post office branches are just like any other business when it comes to being at risk of money laundering. He pointed out that anyone offering banking services gets annual training on how to spot and deal with money laundering, and that head office sends alerts to branches in areas where there seem to be a lot of suspicious transactions.
But while any business that handles cash could be taken advantage of by criminals, it’s also true that few businesses deal with the sheer volume of banknotes that routinely pass through post office branches, making them more exposed to abuse than most. Post office operators are also running a system that we know is already wide open to dirty money, and they’re rewarded based on the total amount of cash they push through it, so the temptation to turn a blind eye or even offer financial services to criminals must always be there.
We have no idea how many insiders have given in to that temptation, and it looks like we probably never will. The disastrous legacy of the Horizon scandal means there’s been little appetite to investigate. With such a deeply flawed system, the best police can hope for is to prosecute the most blatant offenders.
So despite the success of Operation Kilo, Leicestershire police’s Detective Constable Catherine Richards wasn’t exactly hopeful that Gheewala’s conviction would change anything: “Crime is continuing,” she told me. “Money needs to be laundered. And, yeah, somebody else fills those boots, don’t they?”
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Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the other Post Office scandal focusing on money laundering on the high street
General Definitions
Q What is the other Post Office scandal
A It refers to the recent revelation that criminals have been using Post Office branches to launder dirty money This is separate from the Horizon IT scandal where subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted for accounting shortfalls Here the issue is that criminals are exploiting the services to clean their cash
Q How does money laundering actually work on the high street
A Criminals use services like bank transfers bill payments and Western Union money transfers at counters They might deposit large amounts of cash into accounts then immediately transfer it to another account or person making it hard to trace They often use multiple branches and mules to avoid detection
Q Why are Post Offices a target for money launderers
A They are highvolume trusted and accessible They handle a huge amount of cash daily so large deposits dont stand out as much They also offer many banking services for highstreet banks that have closed their physical branches making them a convenient onestop shop for criminals
Q Is this the same as the Horizon scandal
A No The Horizon scandal involved faulty software making it look like subpostmasters were stealing money This new scandal is about external criminals using the system to launder money and the banks and Post Office failing to stop them
The Mechanics The Scammers
Q What is a money mule
A A money mule is a person who is recruited to receive money into their bank account and then withdraw it or transfer it to someone else They are often told its a legitimate job or a way to make quick cash but they are actually helping criminals launder money
Q What are some red flags that a transaction might be money laundering
