The Post Office’s general counsel told the incoming chief executive not to ‘dig into’ details of historical prosecutions, the statutory inquiry has heard.
Nick Read, the Post Office chief executive, told the inquiry today that when he joined the organisation in 2019 that private prosecutions were presented as an ‘historic issue’ that had ceased before 2015.
Read wrote in a witness statement – one of four put before the inquiry today – that he was told ‘I did not need to dig into the details of what had happened at Post Office in the past as this conduct had ended’.
Asked by inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC who had given this instruction, Read said it was general counsel Ben Foat. ‘The reassurance that Mr Foat was trying to provide was that this was historic activity that had ceased in 2015 and had not been initiated since 2013. We were now in 2019 and this was activity that had ceased within the business. I had no reason to believe at that stage we should be going back and looking pre-2013 and 2015.’
The inquiry, which began in 2022, has focused extensively on the Post Office’s prosecutorial powers and how they were exercised in the investigation and prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters over nearly 20 years. All convictions which were based on the now-discredited Horizon IT system have been quashed and the Post Office is handling thousands of compensation claims from those affected.
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Read, who is giving evidence over three days, joined the organisation after the first Bates judgment in which Mr Justice Fraser had been highly critical of the Post Office. The organisation had then made an unsuccessful attempt to have the judge recused before the devastating Horizon issues judgment in December 2019 which led to settlement with 555 claimants.
Despite joining in the midst of this litigation, Read said he had only ‘limited contact’ with the Post Office legal team about the it in his first couple of weeks.
The chief executive said the Post Office had under-estimated the impact of the first common issues judgment, Read said. ‘There was a population who simply didn’t believe they would lose the litigation and there were no contingencies in place – there was a degree of denial,’ he said.
Asked by Beer if some senior figures at the Post Office were living in a ‘dream world’, Read replied: ‘I think it would be impossible not to think that.’
Read’s witness statement also suggested that the Post Office and the government were reluctant to open the Horizon issues into a wider inquiry. He recalled that the business department’s permanent secretary ‘wanted a short independent four-month review so we could move on and I could focus on the day job of moving the Post Office forward’.
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