A senior Post Office solicitor was told about dozens of issues with the computer system just days before a pregnant sub-postmistress was convicted, the Post Office Inquiry heard this week.
Rob Wilson, former head of criminal prosecutions, received an email on 8 October 2010 stating that ‘discrepancies’ with the Horizon IT system had been detected at 40 branches. This bug had caused an apparent loss of £20,000 to show up on the system.
The email, labelled as of ‘high importance and confidential’ was sent by a member of the Post Office security team and was disclosed to the inquiry for the first time when Wilson gave evidence for a second time on Tuesday.
Wilson forwarded the email and its contents to two solicitor colleagues, Jarnail Singh and Juliet McFarlane, but did not disclose it to defence solicitors or defendants. All three solicitors have been reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, although any potential disciplinary proceedings against them have been put on hold at the request of the inquiry.
The trial of Seema Misra started three days after Wilson received and passed on the email outlining the discrepancies with the branch accounts. Despite arguing that Horizon had caused shortfalls in her branch account, she was found guilty of theft and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, Wilson now accepted it was wrong not to disclose information about bugs in the system that he had known about. He agreed the discrepancies were a significant problem and invisible to sub-postmasters trying to balance the accounts, but suggested he believed the issue being flagged up was not relevant to the Misra case.
The email explained that one option for fixing the IT problem was to override the branch accounts and correct errors. This was ruled out as it involved the risk of raising concerns about ‘tampering’ and could have ‘moral implications of Post Office changing branch data without informing the branch’.
Wilson said he had previously been told the Post Office could not alter figures without a sub-postmaster’s knowledge, but despite this contradiction he did not raise concerns after receiving the email.
Inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC asked: ‘Was there a belief or mindset within the Post Office that that is a bad thing: “If we tell postmasters that there’s a problem with Horizon, even if there is, that is generally a bad thing”?’
Wilson replied: ‘The more I read these papers, the more I get the impression that, certainly at a senior level, that was the attitude.’
Giving evidence last week, former Post Office solicitor Singh said that a celebratory email sent to management after the Misra conviction was dictated to him by a ‘collection of people’ and approved by Wilson.
Wilson said he was not in the office on that day and did not authorise the sending of the email in any way.
Edward Henry KC, representing victims including Misra at the inquiry, told Wilson he was a ‘submissive servant of the Post Office’s commercial interests’ and that his duties as a private prosecutor were ‘twisted, degraded or suborned’ in the service of his employer. Wilson denied that was the case and rejected the suggestion he put commercial values above his duties as a solicitor.
The inquiry continues.
