A senior in-house lawyer with the Post Office advised her employer to ‘throw money’ at keeping problems with the IT system out of the public domain, an inquiry has heard.
The statutory inquiry into the Post Office scandal also heard yesterday that a different lawyer with the Post Office suggested trying to ‘persuade’ a joint expert who found defects that he was wrong in his opinion.
The disclosures came during a day of the inquiry focused on the civil proceedings against sub-postmistress Julie Wolstenholme, who ran the Cleveleys branch in Lancashire. The Post Office pursued her for £25,000 through the civil courts and instructed IT expert Jason Coyne to assess whether there was evidence she was responsible for losses.
But Coyne reported in 2003 that there were defects with the Horizon system and said he was not given access to the full list of call logs from Wolstenholme to a dedicated helpdesk. Horizon was eventually found to be faulty years later but only after it had been the basis for hundreds of wrongful prosecutions of Post Office staff.
After Coyne’s evidence, the inquiry heard from Susanne Helliwell, who was a solicitor with Weightman Vizards (now Weightmans) with responsibility for the Cleveleys case.
As part of her defence and a counter-claim for unfair dismissal, Wolstenholme had supplied the Post Office with details of ‘persistent inadequacies’ with the Horizon system. When Coyne produced a report concluding that the system was defective and the majority of counting errors could not be attributed to Wolstenholme, Post Office managers dismissed this as a ‘very one-sided view’ full of general assumptions.
In January 2004, with the Cleveleys case about to come before Blackpool County Court, Post Office lawyer Jim Cruise wrote an internal email saying Coyne’s evidence was ‘clearly unhelpful’ to the claim against Wolstenholme.
Cruise, who retired soon after, further wrote: ‘It may be that we can take up with the expert witness some of the matters referred to in the report and clarify them or even persuade them that they are wrong.’
Helliwell then wrote to Coyne asking whether, further to comments from Fujitsu (the Horizon supplier), these might alter the opinion expressed in his report. He responded to say that his opinion had not changed.
An internal email from a Fujitsu employee to Cruise said the company was ‘disappointed that [Coyne] was unable or unwilling to change any of his original opinions’, claiming that the IT expert had ‘assumed the moral high ground’ and that his analysis was ‘at best selective and at worst simply wrong, and his conclusions partial’.
By June 2004, the inquiry heard, Fujitsu was reporting the situation with the Cleverleys claim was ‘not good’. Cruise had taken early retirement and his manager Mandy Talbot, another lawyer, was now advising on the best course of action.
Jan Holmes, a Fujitsu internal auditor, reported that Talbot’s view on the eve of an August trial was that ‘the safest way to manage this is to throw money at it and get a confidentiality agreement signed [by Wolstenholme]’. Talbot was said to be unhappy with the expert’s report and wanted ‘if possible to keep it out of the public domain’, which was unlikely to happen if the claim went to court.
Holmes reported that Talbot believed the liability question could be removed ‘and it’s then just about "how much to go away and keep your mouth shut’’.
Counsel instructed by the Post Office later advised that the claim against Wolstenholme would likely fail and her claim for notice pay would succeed. Helliwell said she agreed with this at the time, recalling that the Post Office wanted to avoid Coyne’s report being in the public arena.
‘I just know from their point of view they would not want the adverse publicity of defects being shown in the Horizon system,’ she added.
The inquiry continues today with Helliwell giving further evidence, followed by evidence from Colin Lenton-Smith, former Fujitsu Pathway commercial and financial director.
