Post Office Scandal

Reporting the Post Office Horizon IT Scandal

Post Office Scandal

Reporting the Post Office Horizon IT Scandal

  • Ismay: the Idiot Returns

    Nick Wallis

    26 comments

    8 min read
    Rod Ismay

    Rod Ismay’s role in the Post Office was senior – he finished as Head of Product and Branch Accounting reporting directly to the Chief Finance Officer. He appears to have taken a leading, or as Jason Beer KC would have it “co-ordinating” role in responding to Horizon challenges throughout his career at the Post Office. This went well beyond his authorship of the disastrous Ismay report, which the Post Office relied on to keep prosecuting Subpostmasters for at least two years.

    I’ve written here about Ismay’s first stint at giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Today, almost exactly a year on, Ismay returned, seemingly much more nervous and fortgetful. His testimony on oath was preceded by the Chair’s notice on self-incrimination – which gave Ismay the right to ask if he might not answer a question if he felt doing so might incriminate him in a court of law. It was an indication that Ismay is a person of interest to the police and Crown Prosecution Service.

    You can read my collated live tweets from today’s session in one single web-page here.

    Rambling Rod

    Today, the fact of Ismay report was more important than its contents. Jason Beer KC who asked questions on behalf of the Inquiry wanted to know more about Ismay’s position within the Post Office’s structure and culture. Was he more of a controlling mind, as his qualifications, seniority and involvement in Horizon rebuttal activities appeared to suggest? Or was he just a hapless chump – willing to look for criminal stupidity in Subpostmasters whilst blithely defending Horizon in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary?

    Time and again, Jason Beer pointed to clear evidence Ismay knew about Fujitsu’s capacity to access Subpostmaster accounts. Time and again, this qualified auditor agreed he did have knowledge of remote access to Horizon, or bugs in the system, or red flags raised by independent investigators, but time and again he failed to draw the dots. There was a lot on, he told Beer. So many meetings about so many things. The idea an innocent Subpostmaster might have been suspended, sacked, prosecuted, or sent to prison was very far away from what passed for the front of Ismay’s mind.

    When confronted with document he wrote acknowledging Fujitsu’s ability to tamper with Subpostmaster accounts, Ismay told Beer:

    “This is written as if at the time I’d got some perception in writing this that perhaps it hadn’t been built. That it was an option that would require some build.”

    Beer wanted to know how Ismay had come up with this:

    Jason Beer KC

    “Where had you got that “perception” from if from the documents we have seen that you were passed made it clear that there was no conditionality? It wasn’t that ‘if Fujitsu could do this, it would be a bad thing’. It was ‘they could do this thing’.”

    “Well, I could only think it came from a conversation with IT”, ventured Ismay, before embarking on a long explanation of “a concept” of “a number of options” that would require “a build” to make it function.

    Beer cut in to point out that there was no “conditionality” in his email. Ismay insisted it could be “read into” the document, whilst acknowledging:

    “I know the narrative in here doesn’t say that, but one writes what one writes and in hindsight you can wish there were all sorts of things you could have written into it and I’m giving you the wider context of what I think could have influenced my thinking and that wider context hasn’t all been written in here.”

    Quite.

    When asked why, on the basis of what he was now claiming he didn’t know for sure about remote acces and seek to his 2010 report (celebrated in 2013 by the Post Office Chair, Alice Perkins who told him it was “a very good document”), Ismay replied:

    “Well because evidently lots of people were aware of it from this and I wasn’t tasked with doing an ongoing update of [sic] report. My… as you can see from the annual appraisal document that we’ve got in this pack you can the number of things that I was involved of which this was a very small part of a wide range of things and so in hindsight, absolutely in hindsight, I wish I’d done something to respond to this, but at the time, with loads of competing pressures, sadly, this one didn’t lead me to do what in hindsight I would wish I would have done to have responded to it but I was doing many many, and I know this doesn’t… this won’t satisfy Subpostmasters impacted by all of this, but I’d got loads and loads of different competing priorities – pre-privatisation – going on and efficiency reviews in my team and so, sadly, I didn’t do something on the back of this. I wish I had, but I didn’t. And I was exceedingly busy with loads of other competing priorities.”

    I would describe this as one of Ismay’s shorter answers. Over the last twelve months he seems to have become more incurious, more verbose, more rambling.

    A cold mess

    Ismay claimed to be a big supporter of Subpostmasters and their work. Yet in 2006, when he saw an email from a Post Office civil litigator Mandy Talbot crowing that the High Court ruling against Lee Castleton “will be of tremendous use in convincing other postmasters to think twice about their allegations”, Ismay quoted it approvingly, adding that the ruining of Castleton:

    “should be a considerable addition to our armoury in responding to the number of other cases that may have been stirred up by Mr Castleton’s letters into the Subpostmaster magazine. One letter tried to get something like “class actions”. He certainly had other agents writing in to reply to him and suggesting more cases.”

    Ismay said he was “not proud” of this response. investigating these cases to get to the truth of the matter was not Mr Ismay’s priority. And when Beer asked Ismay about what actually happened to Lee Castleton, he replied:

    “My belief, from what auditors were saying to me from what they’d found, that there was a genuine theft of something.”

    Yet this was one of the most obvious cases of Horizon error across the whole Post Office estate. Lee had the Horizon helpline from the moment there were problems in his branch, explaining everything that was happening, keeping all his paperwork and begging the Post Office to come and have a look at the hardware and/or software in his branch because it was throwing up random discrepancies that Lee was being told were his responsibility.

    Ismay told Beer:

    “I understood in this case safe doors were open, the office doors were open and someone came back in a state into the office there and there’d been all sorts of audit satisfaction that money had been stolen and so in hindsight that may have been totally wrong and what’s been said by the person who’d written that witness statement suggests that it was not a reliable witness statement that had been put but that was the kind of stuff that was influencing my perspective… that context of auditors went to a branch because there was some suspicion that led them to go there, and when they found all the doors open and the things that were in that statement that would reinforce well… probably there was a theft had happened.”

    As we now know, thanks to the Inquiry investigation into the Castleton case, the witness statement by Post Office “auditor” Helen Rose (who had never been trained as an auditor) contained wholly false information. Suggesting the safe and office doors were open later turned out to be a “mistake” on a checklist, and the allegation about drinking was apparently fabricated some twelve months after the event, conveniently, just as the case was about to go to trial. There was no evidence (or indeed allegation) of theft, but that didn’t stop Roderick from sucking up the Post Office cultural narrative. Despite his seniority, training and apparent intelligence.

    Lee Castleton was ruined as a result of the High Court action against him. Talbot and Ismay were right – the Castleton ruling was used as a way of warning off Subpostmasters who were considering legal action after being sacked or forced to use their own cash to plug Horizon-generated discrepancies in their branch accounts. Throughout all this Rod (another pious sort, btw) counted his fat salary and looked forward to his comfortable pension.

    Of course Ismay is a spoon, but it rather suits him to present himself as one right now. A jury might just buy fatuous stupidity over criminal intent. Either way the legacy of his actions is more than unfortunate, it’s malignant, even by the standards of the individuals complicit in this scandal.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story until Thu 16 May 2024. There are six more dates remaining in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Surrey and Essex. You can find the specific venues and timings here. All look likely to sell out except Swindon (Mon 13 May) which, for some reason is doing quite badly. If you can make it to the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, I’d love to see you.

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • The One Thing Brian Altman Did Wrong

    Nick Wallis

    63 comments

    8 min read
    Brian Altman KC

    Brian Altman’s role in perpetuating the Post Office scandal is self-evident. He gave advice which helped a bent client keep a lid on a gargantuan miscarriage of justice. Whether that was down to any professional failings was in issue today. Altman had sight of clear evidence of criminal activity (orders to shred documents, misleading a court), massive failures of disclosure (the Misra case), prosecutor misconduct (the Hamilton case), yet he somehow managed to give advices (and, later, set court strategies) which were neatly in line with his client’s wishes.

    “Do you think that you might have been set up?” asked Ed Henry KC towards the end of the day.
    “It’s a very interesting proposition, Mr Henry”, Altman replied. He then referenced an email chain where the Post Office and their legal advisors were discussing who to get on board to help them in the light of the Clarke Advice and the CK Sift Review.

    In the chain, Gavin Matthews from Bond Dickinson purrs approvingly that though Altman has just stepped down as First Senior Treasury Counsel (a very very senior criminal prosecutor), he “has the ear of the DPP/AGs Office” [Director of Public Prosecutions/Attorney General]
    “His connections sound useful,” replies Hugh Flemington, the Post Office’s Head of Legal.

    Altman told Henry he was dwelling on the idea he was set up as “a thought to wrestle with.”

    The brilliant operator

    But Altman is no dupe. We were reminded by Sam Stein KC that Altman’s chambers’ website describes him as “one of the greats of the bar” and a “brilliant operator.” So how did he come to find himself, as Ed Henry put it, consistently managing to “back the wrong horse.” What did Altman actually do wrong?

    Very little, according to B. Altman KC. The totemic misjudgment he would admit to was his failure to recommend that Seema Misra and others should be told that the Post Office’s expert witness in her trial was “tainted”. This related to the Clarke Advice. Altman accepted several times it was a “misjudgment”, and explained it by saying that “it is something I have thought about and it is something that should have been disclosed to appropriate people.”

    So, said Jason Beer KC (who asked questions for most of the day) “nothing was done to inform convicted defendants or those in any ongoing cases that Mr Jenkins had wrongly withheld his knowledge of bugs in the Horizon system.”
    “Unhappily that has to be the case,” replied Altman. “With the benefit of hindsight, and having thought an awful lot about this, it’s something that should have been considered for disclosure and disclosed in appropriate cases. No question.”
    “And should have been disclosed by you, Mr Altman,” intoned Beer.
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m accepting that” Altman acknowledged.

    Shredding order ≠ Teething problem

    In Altman’s world, an order from John Scott, the Post Office’s Head of Security, to shred documents was a “cultural” or “teething” problem. He initially claimed the word “cultural” had been coined by Post Office General Counsel Susan Crichton and that “teething” was not something he said in reference to Scott’s order, before grudgingly conceding it had been. He claimed that in no way was he “minimising” what might be perceived as an attempt to pervert the course of justice. When asked why he did nothing about it, Altman told the Inquiry that he was informed that Scott’s “ridiculous” instruction had been “overcome”.

    Altman was taken to a letter being written by the Office the Criminal Cases Review Commission which championed his monitoring of the Cartwright King Sift review as “fundamentally sound”. Altman was sent a draft of the letter for his comments. Beer noted the letter failed to inform the CCRC of the Helen Rose report and the Clarke Advice. On the latter, Altman simply said it “should have”. He could not explain why the Helen Rose report wasn’t even mentioned.

    Internally it seems Altman’s designation of the CK review as “fundamentally sound” was used in the same way Second Sight’s declaration there were no system-wide issues with Horizon was waved in the faces of people raising queries. Altman was taken to an email by Andy Parsons from (later Womble) Bond Dickinson which stated his conclusion gives the Post Office. “good grounds to resist any formal external review of its historic prosecutions (ie by the Criminal Cases Review Commission).”

    Altman was asked if he thought his advice was going to be used in this way. “Absolutely not”, he replied.

    Dodgy advice(s)

    The most laughable piece of Advice given by Altman was produced on 19 Dec 2013. He declared to his clients:

    “I have seen no evidence to suggest that Post Office Ltd exercises its investigations and prosecution function in anything other than a well-organised, structured and efficient manner, through an expert and dedicated team of in-house investigators and lawyers, supported by Cartwright King solicitors and their in-house counsel, as well as
    external counsel and agents where required.”

    Where, enquired Beer, did he get this from?

    “Based on what Post Office had sent to me, I’d met Cartwright King, I’d met Rodric Williams, I’d met Jarnail Singh, once, maybe twice, and I had read by that stage, certainly two of the prosecution files…. and I think the overarching view I’d come up with is reflected in that paragraph.”

    Jarnail Singh?! Beer drilled down into this:

    JB: Had you examined any documents or material relating to the training of investigators?
    BA: I’ve got an idea I might have asked for something, but I can’t remember
    JB: Had you examined the knowledge and experience of Post Office investigators?
    BA: I think I knew some of them were former police officers.
    JB: Was that the extent of it?
    BA: I can’t remember.
    JB: Had you examined the investigators knowledge of and practical application of the law of disclosure?
    BA: No.
    JB: Had you examined the extent to which investigators actively investigated all reasonable lines of enquiry, including those which point away from the guilt of a suspect?
    BA: No.
    JB: Had you investigated what supervision, checks and balances existed if any to superintend the work of the investigators?
    BA: Well I understood that Cartwright King were involved, the external agents, and I understood that they were the instructing solicitors. I had met Simon Clarke and I had met Harry Bowyer and I remember being impressed by them.
    JB: That’s being impressed by lawyers. I’m asking about the superintendence or supervision of the investigators.
    BA: No but I rather thought that Cartwright King had that superintendence.
    JB: Had you examined how, in practice, decisions as to whether to prosecute or not were made in practice?
    BA: No.
    JB: Had you discovered who the decision maker was in relation to any decision to prosecute?
    BA: Well, if my memory serves me during the course of this review I had referred to several Post Office policies and I think one of those policies put the ultimate decision in the hands of someone non-legal. So I made a point about that.
    JB: Had you examined what the training or experience of that person was?
    BA: Of that person, no, but the point I made was that it had to be in the hands of a legal individual.
    JB: Did you examine how much consideration that person gave to an analysis of the evidential strength of a case?
    BA: No.
    JB: Did you examine what tests that decision-maker applied when deciding a case was to be prosecuted?
    BA: No.

    Beer wondered, “given all those things” how Altman could come to the conclusion that the Post Office “exercises its investigatory function in a well-organised, structured and efficient manner?”
    Altman replied that he was talking about a “hierarchical structure”. He wasn’t “deep diving”.
    Beer wondered if Altman if there was a “danger” his conclusions could be “misunderstood and therefore misapplied and being used as a weapon by the Post Office in fending off criticisms of it.”
    “Yes I can see that”, replied Altman. “At the time I didn’t appreciate that it would be.”

    But it was, though, wasn’t it? Which makes Brian Altman very much part of the problem.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story until Thu 16 May 2024. There are six more dates remaining in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Surrey and Essex. You can find the specific venues and timings here. All look likely to sell out except Swindon (Mon 13 May) which, for some reason is doing quite badly. If you can make it to the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, I’d love to see you.

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • Belinda Cortes-Martin (Crowe): Sir Humphrey would be proud

    Nick Wallis

    23 comments

    8 min read

    Belinda Cortes-Martin had a dual role. Whilst she was supposedly heading up the Post Office’s Complaint and Mediation Scheme’s Working Group secretariat, supporting and answering to the Working Group’s independent Chair, Sir Anthony Hooper (a retired Court of Appeal judge), Cortes-Martin was also Programme Director for Project Sparrow, the top secret Post Office body set up to control the Complaint and Mediation Scheme (CMS), run by the Post Office CEO, Paula Vennells.

    If you think I’m over-egging how secret Project Sparrow was, during the High Court litigation in 2018, the Post Office tried to claim the very word Sparrow was legally privileged and couldn’t be used in court, a concept Mr Justice Fraser said he was “struggling with”, despite letting it go. I am not sure even Second Sight or the Working Group knew of Project Sparrow’s existence. Cortes-Martin did, though.

    It seems that whilst the Working Group may have thought of Cortes-Martin as, at most, a neutral party, she was, in fact a conduit of information from the Working Group (WG) back to the Project Sparrow gang (Bond Dickinson’s Andy Parsons, Vennells, Chris Aujard, Rodric Williams, Mark Davies and Angela van den Bogerd).

    No authority

    Today, BCM painted herself as someone with little or no authority. She didn’t read crucial documents, or when she did, she didn’t read them in a way which caused alarm bells to go off. Some documents she wrote meant something very different from the way they could be read. When caught on the hook she defaulted to claiming she was answering in the abstract [?] before delivering some fluent civil service guff which didn’t so much come across like a post-rationalisation exercise in justifying some dodgy-looking emails, but an active attempt to persuade the inquiry her emails were noble attempts to do the right thing when read from a possibly invented premise.

    If you want to read the live tweets, collated with screenshots of a raft of documents, click here.

    In many ways Cortes-Martin was one of the most dangerous witnesses because she was clearly very bright and very careful, a career civil servant from 1979 to 2011, eventually leaving as Information Director at the Ministry of Justice.

    Flora Page

    Although she seemed extremely reluctant to admit it, Cortes-Martin was working to remove Second Sight’s grip of the investigation from pretty much the moment she came on board. Barrister Flora Page took BCM to an email she wrote to Angela van den Bogerd on 22 October 2013, very shortly after Cortes-Martin began working on the CMS. In it she says:

    “I said I would do a note about how to move to a place where Second Sight are able to leave the WG and allow Post Office to take over sole responsibility for [Horizon/Subpostmaster] investigations.”

    Page notes she failed to mention this in her Witness Statement. “Did you forget about it?” she asked.
    “I definitely didn’t recall it” replied Cortes-Martin.

    On 9 April 2014, Andy Parsons from (later Womble) Bond Dickinson sent Cortes-Martin the first Clarke Advice. Barrister Emma Price asked her if she read it. Cortes-Martin told her:

    “I have to assume I didn’t read it… The reason I don’t believe I saw this is that I did continue to insert into briefing comments about Post Office’s confidence in the safety of its prosecutions and I can’t imagine I would have done so, having read this.”

    Cortes-Martin told Price that if she did see it, she would ask questions of Jarnail Singh, Andy Parsons and Chris Aujard. The Inquiry chair, Sir Wyn Williams wanted to know why she wouldn’t have told the Sir Anthony Hooper, a retired Court of Appeal Criminal Division judge, who she reported to on the Working Group. Cortes-Martin replied:

    “All of the issues that arose in relation to Horizon or indeed prosecutions had a much wider application than just those cases in the scheme, so I think I would have wanted to understand the situation before I did anything wider. If I might take your point slightly further… if I had read this and asked questions and about it and was not satisfied with the response that I got, then I think Sir Anthony Hooper, as opposed to going to the WG is the person I would have discussed this with.”

    Thankfully, Cortes-Martin didn’t read the Clarke Advice, so what she might have done was academic. Phew.

    Following on from Cortes-Martin’s role in quietly trying to shepherd Second Sight out of the Post Office whilst supplying the Working Group on which Second Sight sat, we were shown an internal response to an email written in Jan 2014 by Cortes-Martin in which she said in CAPS:

    “WE NEED TO CONSIDER CAREFULLY WHAT AND HOW WE SEEK TO FETTER [Second Sight]. SAH HAS MADE IT CLEAR THAT SS CAN INCLUDE WHAT IT WANTS SO WE NEED TO TREAD CAREFULLY.”

    Price wanted to know what Cortes-Martin meant by a desire to “fetter” Second Sight and the need to “consider carefully”. Cortes-Martin said:

    “one doesn’t necessarily expect that some ten years later you’re going to be asking questions about it, so I acknowledge in this and other emails I have not chosen my words as I might have done, had I known this.”

    Which appears to be acknowledging that if she thought anyone external would read her words, she would have tried to hide her true intentions. Then she came up with a piece of sophistry:

    “What I’m saying here is there must be something that Second Sight has objected to that makes it look as if the Post Office is trying to fetter it and what I’m saying is, we need to think carefully about the extent to which we do that and actually it’s nothing more than that. So – don’t try to fetter Second Sight in a way that’s not appropriate, particularly in the light of what Sir Anthony Hooper said.”

    Hmm. Judge for yourself.

    Not satisfactory

    Cortes-Martin was shown an email sent to her by Andy Parsons about the Helen Rose (HR) report which notes a clear issue with Horizon where it ascribes activities on the audit database to Subpostmasters when they are, in fact, generated by the system. Parsons says:

    “our preferred approach is to try to down play the importance of the HR report in any POL [Post Office Ltd] Investigation Reports [for the CMS]. We recommend minimalising or ignoring entirely the HR Report when responding to CQRs [Case Review Questionnaires – applications to the scheme]”

    Cortes-Martin did nothing about this, instead saying it was “a matter of regret, among many, if I may say so” that Parsons’ advice was “not satisfactory”. Cortes-Martin contended that if the HR report was “not important” that should have been “clearly stated” to an applicant. “I wish”, she said, “and indeed, on reflection, I should have challenged that.”

    And this was the closest Cortes-Martin got to an admission of fault. When she was asked by Price what else she regretted, she replied:

    “I regret not digging down deeper into some of the issues which clearly passed my desk. Had I done so, I might have asked more questions. I can’t guarantee, because this whole issue continued well after I left, that it would have made any difference. But it’s quite… looking at documents this far after the event, I’ve looked at a few and thought I could have done something differently with that… and I would say regretting being involved with it in any way at all is my biggest regret.”

    I suspect she manages to sleep easily enough.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story until Thu 16 May 2024. There are six more dates remaining in Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Surrey and Essex. You can find the specific venues and timings here. All look likely to sell out except Swindon (Mon 13 May) which, for some reason is doing quite badly. If you can make it to the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, I’d love to see you.

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • Keeping their knees on Seema’s neck

    Nick Wallis

    42 comments

    9 min read
    Seema Misra sitting next to her barrister, Ed Henry KC

    Today we got some insight into the catastrophic and frankly sinister failings of a group of lawyers at the heart of the Post Office scandal. The lengths Brian Altman (then) QC et al went to to avoid their post-conviction disclosure duties to former Subpostmaster Seema Misra (who was sent to prison whilst eight weeks pregnant) are mind-boggling.

    Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins had given expert evidence at Seema Misra’s 2010 trial without disclosing his knowledge of bugs, errors and defects within the Post Office’s Horizon system. In June 2013, Simon Clarke, an in-house barrister at Cartwright King (who prosecuted Subpostmasters on behalf of the Post Office) became aware of the draft Second Sight Interim Report.

    Second Sight were independent investigators being paid by the Post Office (at the behest of MPs and the Justice for Subpostmasters’ Alliance) to look into Subpostmaster complaints. The Second Sight Interim Report contained notice of at least two serious bugs in Horizon.

    On seeing the draft report, Clarke and his colleague Martin Smith called Gareth Jenkins. Without telling Jenkins, they recorded the conversation.

    During the call, Jenkins candidly admitted he was the information source for Second Sight’s bug notice. That led to the first Clarke Advice in which Simon Clarke told the Post Office that Jenkins was a tainted witness who could not be used in future court cases. Clarke also recommended that all Post Office prosecutions should be reviewed.

    So far so good. Simon Clarke had (correctly) thrown an enormous spanner in the works of the Post Office’s bent prosecution machine. What has mystified legal folk since is why Seema Misra was not told her conviction may be unsafe.

    We know that Gareth Jenkins was not properly instructed as an expert witness, but no one to date disagrees with Clarke’s analysis. Jenkins knew about the extent of bugs in Horizon, but did not reveal them to Seema’s defence team or the court. As Martin Smith today agreed, Jenkins had potentially perjured himself, perverted the course of justice or both. This should have been disclosed to Mrs Misra, but was not.

    Martin Smith giving evidence today

    Crawling out of the Woodwork

    The review of Post Office prosecutions became a Cartwright King review of prosecutions post-2010 on fairly arbitrary grounds. Furthermore, the question for the review was not whether to tell Postmaster defence teams that Gareth Jenkins was a tainted witness. It was whether or not to give them two documents (the Second Sight Interim Report and the Helen Rose Report) which revealed bugs in Horizon.

    Brian Altman QC was brought in to review the Cartwright King review. On 9 September 2013, eight lawyers gathered at the feet of Altman. They were Susan Crichton, Rodric Williams, Jarnail Singh (all Post Office), Simon Clarke, Harry Bowyer, Martin Smith (Cartwright King), Andy Parsons and Gavin Matthews (both Bond Dickinson).

    The issue of Gareth Jenkins is front and centre to the discussion. Altman brings up Seema Misra and voices his concern that Jenkins (uniquely) gave oral evidence at her trial. The case was brought before 2010, and therefore before the arbitrary cut off date the Post Office had chosen to review its prosecutions. According to Smith’s typed notes of the meeting, Altman wondered how they were going to “deal” with Seema Misra if “she comes forward”.

    “So she’s got to come forward”, noted Henry. “The impetus is on her. No one is going to tell her.”
    Smith did not demur.
    “It seems, by this stage, no one wanted to provide Mrs Misra with a ‘ticket’ to use your expression, to the Court of Appeal. Adopt a passive approach. Correct?”.
    “I would certainly agree”, replied Smith “the Post Office did not want, at that stage, to be actively encouraging people to go to the Court of Appeal.”

    Mrs Misra was sitting next to her barrister Ed Henry KC as he took Martin Smith through these notes.

    The minutes also record Altman approving (as “sensible”) the 2010 cut off date for what became known as the CK Sift Review and reviewing pre-2010 applicants on a case-by-case basis. He then notes the Post Office “can’t avoid the possibility [the? more?] Misras might crawl out of the woodwork”. Like insects, Brian, right?

    Smith’s typewritten note of the meeting with Altman

    Henry wanted to know why Seema Misra wasn’t a slam dunk for disclosure, given that an expert witness, who may have committed perjury during her trial, was now accepted by all present as tainted.

    “I don’t know”, replied Smith.

    The meeting minutes show the gang of lawyers keep coming back to the Misra issue. When Gavin Matthews suggests apologising, Altman says “I wouldn’t.” He is also adamant she needs to be kept out of the mediation scheme, or the Post Office is “storing up trouble”.

    Sir Wyn Williams

    During his questioning, Henry brought Smith’s mind to focus. “You realise of course that I am sitting next to Mrs Seema Misra today?” he asked.

    “I… I… I didn’t realise that”, replied Smith, with some surprise in his voice.

    The inquiry Chair, Sir Wyn Williams, had a question for Smith about his notes: “What does ‘Misra unique’ mean, so far as you are concerned?”
    “I am afraid I’ve got no idea, sir.” Smith replied.
    “Let me jog your memory”, Henry interjected. “It’s because it’s the only case in which Mr Jenkins gave oral evidence against a defendant.”
    “That may be the case”, Smith accepted.

    Clearly passes the disclosure threshold

    Henry took Smith to a Cartwright King note likely written by Smith’s colleague Harry Bowyer which stated that by December 2013 it was his opinion that the Misra case “clearly passes the disclosure threshold” and that Cartwright King “will be disclosing the Second Sight Interim Report and the Helen Rose report to Misra’s lawyers”.

    By January 2014, this advice has somehow, magically changed. Simon Clarke is now reviewing the Misra case, and he concludes she is due no disclosure, advice Henry told the Inquiry Clarke forwarded to his colleague Martin Smith with a covering email simply stating “Phew!!!”

    Henry asked Smith if he believed Seema was “owed the truth”. Smith agreed “absolutely”. So, Henry asked, what happened between December 2013 and January 2014 to change Cartwright King’s advice?

    Smith suggested more documents about Seema Misra’s case had become available to Cartwright King, but how they had a bearing on the final – reputationally essential – decision not to disclose, was not something he could opine on.

    Simon Clarke will be giving evidence to the Inquiry next week, as will Brian Altman (now) KC. I wonder if they will be asked if they ever considered that in not disclosing crucial evidence to Seema Misra they might have been perverting the course of justice.

    An Enemy of the Business

    Another previously unseen document surfaced today. It is a draft briefing by Second Sight which was commissioned by Post Office General Counsel Susan Crichton and given to her successor Chris Aujard in January 2014. It is a review of the investigation function of the Post Office. The language in the document is stark. Second Sight state:

    “POL [Post Office] Investigators often appear to have paid scant attention to the interviewee’s assertions of innocence or his/her reference to specific transaction anomalies. They seem to have shown little or no willingness to establish the underlying root cause of any given shortfall.”

    Second Sight accept that in coming to their conclusions they “have not interviewed any of the members of the Investigation Team, nor its senior management. We have not reviewed its mandate, manpower or workload.”

    Nonetheless they are confident enough in what they had seen to conclude:

    “The overwhelming impression gained from reviewing the transcripts of investigative interviews is that the SPMR [Subpostmaster] was viewed as an enemy of the business. The culture within the Investigation Team appears to be one of a presumption of guilt when conducting an investigation, rather than the aim of seeking the truth.”

    A presumption of guilt is an obvious precursor to a miscarriage of justice, and the authors of the report (Ron Warmington and likely Ian Henderson) note that the mishandling of investigations has led to where the Post Office had got itself in 2013 – dealing with some very angry people claiming they had been falsely prosecuted. Second Sight explains why bad investigations are bad for business:

    “Because identifying loss drivers and correcting systemic weaknesses is such an essential part of Effective Loss Management, it is absolutely vital that the organisation does that job really well… It is hard to overstate the importance of this function in maintaining the health of the organisation.”

    Second Sight make a series of recommendations and add contextual references over eight very readable pages.

    The report was described today by Chris Aujard as “heavily caveated”. The barrister Flora Page wondered if it did not demand “immediate attention.” Despite the clear warnings about the state of the Post Office’s investigation function and the potential for miscarriages of justice, Aujard disagreed. He told the Inquiry he read the report and then “put it to one side.”

    I have scanned and uploaded a fully searchable version below.

    Second Sight’s draft report on the Post Office investigation functionDownload

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here). We desperately need to sell more tickets in Hayes (Sunday 5 May) and Swindon (Mon 13 May) for some reason. All the rest are doing quite well. If you can make it to Hayes or Swindon, I’d love to see you!

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • Martin Smith and the Instruction to Shred

    Nick Wallis

    18 comments

    9 min read
    Smith takes the oath

    The mystery of who at the Post Office (or Bond Dickinson) decided to shred minutes relating to an important meeting at the Post Office to discuss problems with the Horizon IT system got a little more dramatic today as Martin Smith, a solicitor working for Cartwright King, gave evidence.

    Smith was a prosecuting solicitor who took on Post Office cases under instruction from the Post Office. He had no training in the role having been a duty defence solicitor who then joined Cartwright King and moved to Post Office prosecutions after Cartwright King won the Post Office contract.

    Smith was walked through his involvement in the case of Khayyam Ishaq, an innocent man who Smith helped put in prison. Smith did not read relevant documents and he made disclosure decisions which seemed to fly in the face of the relevant requirements. Nonetheless it was his evidence about the Post Office’s apparent desire to illegally shred documentats relating to problems with Horizon which made the only two hacks in the Inquiry room – me and Fiona Parker from the Daily Telegraph – suddenly start paying very close attention at the end of a long day.

    If you want to read my live tweets (lots of screenshots of documents and a blow-by-blow flavour of what’s happening) covering the entire day click here. Fiona’s live-blog (fewer posts, but plenty of direct quotes) can be found here.

    Was it the external lawyers?

    It is July 2013 – the Clarke Advice, written by Smith’s colleague, the barrister Simon Clarke, has been issued to the Post Office. The Clarke Advice was prompted by the realisation that Gareth Jenkins from Fujitsu was a tainted witness, and that some prosecutions were likely unsafe. To ensure all were across the risks going forward, Clarke had recommended setting up a weekly conference call between the Post Office’s IT, legal and security teams, their external lawyers Bond Dickinson and Cartwright King to monitor issues with Horizon to see if they affect any prosecutions.

    The first meeting, known as the “Regular Call re Horizon issues”, opened (according to the minutes published on the Inquiry website) with a note from Rob King in the Post Office Security team stating “no minutes circulated, but we will be taking notes”. According to Smith, Andy Parsons from Bond Dickinson (later Womble Bond Dickinson who ran the disastrous Post Office defence of Bates v Post Office) explained that all documents would be kept on a central hub for reasons of keeping control of the dissemination of information.

    In his witness statement, Smith said he thought this was a sensible idea:

    “Mr Parsons expressed concern with regards to the difficulties which could arise following the circulation of minutes. He was particularly concerned that they could be further disseminated and attract opinion which might well be incorrect and also result in information being stored elsewhere without it being relayed back to the call. He explained that he had previous experience of such issues. It was evident that he was concerned about pre-action discovery in civil cases.

    “My view from a criminal law perspective was that the information was to be reported to a single central hub in accordance with Mr Clarke’s advice – that was the very purpose of the call. I could also understand Mr Parson’s concerns that incorrect information could possibly be generated or that information might not be relayed back to the central hub.”

    Was it the Head of Security?

    Two weeks later, on 31 July, after the third Horizon Issues call, Martin Smith received a phone call from the Post Office’s (then) top criminal lawyer, Jarnail Singh. Smith was driving at the time. According to Smith’s note of the call, Singh told him:

    “JScot [John Scott, the Post Office head of Security] has instructed that the typed minutes be scrapped.”

    That’s the only contemporaneous statement available, but the call lasted 24 minutes. Julian Blake, asking questions for the inquiry, asked Smith what he remembered.

    Smith’s note of his call with Jarnail Singh re John Scott. Note the key word: “scrapped”

    Smith replied:

    “I can recall complaining to [Singh] about the influence being exerted over Post Office in my view by the external civil lawyers and I can also recall him telling me that an instruction had been sent out that typewritten minutes should be scrapped and that if anyone asks, the Cartwright King would be blamed for providing that advice.”

    Smith reports being “absolutely horrified and shocked” by what he heard. He continued:

    “When I had the opportunity to pull over, I was able to use another mobile telephone to record, at a distance, the latter part of the conversation. Because I was so shocked by what I heard.”

    Smith recalled saying to Singh that he understood that no minutes were being circulated, and could see the benefits, but:

    “by the third [Horizon Issues] call there was some form of change proposed… I don’t remember exactly what the change was, but I do remember saying on the call, ‘no – hold on… you still have to keep a central record’.”

    Smith resolved to get Simon Clarke to write another Advice which spelled out “absolutely in black and white” the Post Office’s obligations to record information. Smith actually thought it was the civil lawyers [Bond Dickinson] trying to “water down” and “pull away” from the Post Office’s agreement to keep minutes in a central hub:

    “By the time we got to the third [Horizon Issues] call to start having a position where we’re not going to have anything in writing… that did worry me. I was concerned about that.

    Julian Blake

    Julian Blake wanted to know what Smith meant in his note by the word “scrapped”.

    JB: From your understanding of that telephone call, was it that notes or typed minutes were to be “stopped” or “destroyed”?
    MS: To be destroyed.
    JB: Was that your clear understanding from that conversation?
    MS: Yes.
    JB: We know that in Mr Clarke’s Advice he uses the word “shredded” – do you know where that came from?
    MS: I can only assume it’s arising out of my conversation with Mr Singh.
    JB: And is that something you recall from your conversation with Mr Singh?
    MS: Not at this point in time, no.
    JB: So you don’t recall the specific word “shredded”, but you do recall that typed minutes were to be destroyed rather than there was going to be some kind of stop on taking future notes.
    MS: That was very much my understanding…. Mr Singh told me that the minutes were to be destroyed – I can’t remember the exact phraseology….
    JB: Were to be? Or had been? There’s a big difference between the two.
    MS: I was under the impression that the instruction had gone out and that they had been.

    Blake now wanted to know who the instruction had come from and who it had been sent to. Smith said he was definitely told it was John Scott who had sent the instruction out, but he was unsure who it had been sent to.

    “I’m hesitant here because there were a number of people with the name David, and I’m thinking it was either David Pardoe or David Posnett [both in the PO Security Team], but I’m afraid I can’t… it was a long time ago.”

    Was it the internal lawyers?

    Blake wanted to know if Scott had “received advice on that matter or was acting on his own instigation.” Smith had no idea. Blake took him back to the third Horizon Issues call and wanted to know what had changed. Smith told him:

    “I was left with the distinct impression that Post Office were no longer wanting to keep a record of the [Horizon Issues] calls, and I recall saying ‘No – you must still keep a central record…’.”

    Blake cut in: “You say the Post Office. Who at the Post Office?”

    “I think that was information that came from Rodric Williams”, replied Smith. “I think it was Rodric Williams who said that [and] I think I said “Rodric, you still need to keep a central record”, and I remember not being very happy about it and think this is one for Simon Clarke.”

    All this begat the Second Clarke Advice, on shredding.

    In summary, Martin Smith appears to be alleging that:

    a) during the third Horizon Issues meeting on 31 July 2013, the Post Office lawyer Rodric Williams suggested not taking minutes. Smith remembers admonishing him, telling Williams he had to keep a recprd.

    b) after the meeting, according to Smith’s recollection of his call with Jarnail Singh, a decision was taken at the Post Office to destroy the minutes anyway. John Scott had disseminated the order, and this was complied with.

    c) Singh then called Smith to tell him of the decision and that if anyone queried it, Smith’s firm, Cartwright King, would be “blamed” for issuing the order.

    According to Hugh Flemington’s evidence earlier this week, Scott and Singh did not get on. But something here doesn’t add up. Why would Scott take a unilateral decision to order the shredding of minutes? How could it possibly be accompanied by the suggestion that if word got out, Cartwright King would be blamed? What did Rodric Williams have to do with all this? And why did Simon Clarke’s shredding advice, once written and sent to the Post Office, sit in Rodric Williams’ desk for two weeks before being seen by Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s general counsel?

    And why did none of them seem to give a flying monkeys about the Subpostmasters?

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • What Hugh Didn’t Do

    Nick Wallis

    40 comments

    3 min read
    That would have been Susan Crichton’s area of responsibility

    Hugh Flemington is a very careful man. The former Post Office Head of Legal spent his morning in the Inquiry witness chair characterising his involvement in the Post Office scandal as accidental, at best.

    The problem was, the documents do seem to suggest he was involved at some level, though he couldn’t recall how. He didn’t remember doing things and mostly he didn’t remember not doing things and if he didn’t do something it wasn’t a failing on his part, it just hadn’t occurred to him at the time.

    The tone was set quite early on when barrister for the Inquiry Sam Stevens asked if Mr Flemington knew that the standard of proof in a criminal trial was that a jury had to be sure of guilt. Mr Flemington wasn’t sure, telling Stevens he was reliant on comedy Post Office lawyer Jarnail Singh for his education in criminal law. Stevens was a little taken aback, as well he might be. If Flemington, a senior lawyer, was going to tell the Inquiry he was not able to confirm he knew what the criminal standard of proof was, it was going to be a long morning.

    And it was. Flemington did receive emails but didn’t open attachments. He became aware of the Clarke Advice via osmosis. He didn’t have a view on the Jarnail Singh as the PO’s only criminal lawyer being supervised by Susan Crichton, a General Counsel with no experience of criminal law.

    His one on the record observation about Jarnail Singh (to Susan Crichton) was that Mr Singh “doesn’t seem to be able to do recommendations” ie provide legal advice, the basic job of a lawyer. When asked whether this raised concerns about Singh’s competence, Flemington said it was a comment made in annoyance rather than anything more serious, giving him an excuse not to have to escalated the issue.

    At the end of his session, Flemington told the inquiry:

    “I just wanted to say how sorry personally I felt for all the pain and suffering that has been caused by this scandal to all the people who have suffered. I hope today that in some small way my witness appearance will help the inquiry establish lessons learned.”

    “Small” being the significant word.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • Post Office rewarded director after she lied in court

    Nick Wallis

    50 comments

    16 min read
    Can I get a bonus? Angela van den Bogerd, former Post Office Exec

    Damning evidence about the culture within the Post Office at the very highest level was brought to light during the course of Angela van den Bogerd’s second and likely final day of evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today.

    You can read my live-tweets and see the screenshots of documents posted up during the hearing here. For a summary of the lowlights, read on.

    “Take a step back from the answer of an automaton”

    Van den Bogerd started her career behind the counter of a Crown Office branch in 1985 just after leaving school. She rose to Director of Partnerships, before leaving in 2020. In all that time, she says, the most she contributed to the widest miscarriage of justice in UK legal history was by missing a few things in documents.

    She is exactly the sort of person the Post Office likes. Long-serving, loyal, sharp and biddable. To get a measure of the sort of organisation she is part of, we were taken, at the beginning of the day, to the Post Office’s hounding of Martin Griffiths, a Postmaster driven to suicide.

    Griffiths and his parents had poured tens of thousands of pounds into the Horizon-generated accounting holes in Griffiths’ branch in Hope Farm Road, near Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. At his lowest, Martin was attacked by armed robbers. The Post Office blamed him for that, too, initially demanding he give them the £38,000 that was stolen, later reduced to £7,600.

    In a letter to the Post Office on 17 July 2013, Martin wrote:

    “Over the last 15 months alone, February 2012 – May 2013, more than £39,000 is deemed to be my shortfall, an average of £600 per week. This surely cannot be correct, but the notifications from the Post Office state this is the case. The worry has affected [redacted] and plans for retirement have had to be postponed. I have not had a break in my business hours for more than four years, to keep a tight rein on the office. The financial strain on myself and my family is devastating and continues on a daily basis.”

    Griffiths’ mother, who was in her eighties, also wrote to the Post Office around the same time, telling them:

    “My son has been under severe pressure and I have personally had to take on more work in the retail side of the business, including providing financial support for the shortages. The so-called shortages over many, many months have been repaid mainly by myself and husband. Although you can continue to say there is no fault in the Horizon computer system, we eagerly await the results of the ongoing investigation being undertaken by Second Sight regarding software errors. Your letter of 3 July, stating termination of Martin’s contract, I feel is very harsh. Kevin Bridger [another Post Office employee] has compounded the severe problems adding insult to injury (and I mean injury), by requesting a fine of £7,600 which represents 20% of the robbery with violence which occurred in May. It was due to the identification of the culprit by a member of staff, that the Police were able to make a quick arrest and subsequently the robber received an 8 year jail sentence.”

    By this stage Griffiths was in touch with Alan Bates at the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance. When, on 23 September 2013, Alan was informed that Martin had deliberately stepped in front of a bus and was in a coma, he emailed the Post Office, with the family’s permission. Copying in Paula Vennells and Angela van den Bogerd, Bates wrote:

    “I am aware of Martin’s case, and I know he was terrified to raise his shortages with POL [the Post Office] because of just this type of thing happening to him, but POL got him in the end. Regardless of what may or may not have occurred with him, why did POL have to hound him to the point of trying to take his own life? Why?”

    The Post Office’s reaction was telling. Any thought for the victim, his family, the community? This is the internal email chain which followed:

    The top comment “given the potential media element please can we line up a specialist media lawyer in case we need urgent advice this evening?” came from Mark Davies, the Post Office’s then Director of Communications.

    As Jason Beer KC, counsel to the Inquiry asked van den Bogerd:

    “So the immediate reaction, you agree, is not – is Martin Griffiths alright? What about his health?… The immediate reaction was not – what can we do to help this man’s family?… What about his wife and his children, what about his elderly parents, what about his sister? Shall we get someone down to the hospital? No. The first things was – let’s get a media lawyer. Was that what it was like working for the Post Office at the time? It was all about brand reputation? About brand image?”

    Van den Bogerd embarked on an explanation which involved conflicting reports about what happened. When pressed on the immediate reaction of her colleagues, she said: “I don’t think [PR messaging] was the first thought. It was definitely a consideration in everything that we did, around… you know, PR and the comms element.”

    Beer asked why. Why was it important in this case? “A man has walked in front of a bus,” he said, “one of your Subpostmasters.” Van den Bogerd replied:

    “In all my time with Post Office from very early on I was very conscious that PR was very important and everything had to be… it was a comms team… Mark was comms director at the time. And that’s what he said.”

    After a year, Martin’s daughter, Lauren, wrote to the Post Office:

    “I am emailing to let you know how disgusted we are with the treatment our family has received from the Post Office. As you are well aware it has now been almost a year since we lost our Dad. We hold the Post Office solely and wholly responsible for what happened to him. As I am sure you can imagine, our family has had an extremely tough year… I cannot comprehend how our family has not been supported or compensated this past year. I firmly believe that we would not have received this kind of treatment from any other large corporate organisation.”

    The Post Office’s solution, approved by Angela van den Bogerd, was a £140,000 settlement offer to Martin Griffiths’ wife, Gina. To get it, she would have to drop any future claim against the Post Office, drop out of the Mediation Scheme and sign an NDA. The Post Office proposed sending the cash to her in instalments. Post Office lawyer Rodric Williams told Bogerd the Post Office asked for an NDA “as an incentive to Mrs Griffiths maintaining confidentiality. As drafted, if Mrs Griffiths were to breach confidentiality, we could stop any further payments but not recoup sums already paid.”

    Beer paused his reading: “An incentive to maintain confidentiality. That was important for the Post Office, wasn’t it?”

    Van den Bogerd said it was Rodric Williams who wrote the email.

    Beer stopped her: “This is about a different issue. This about the Post Office staging payments to act as an ‘incentive’ to her – a sword of Damocles hanging over her. You don’t get any more money unless you keep quiet. That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

    “That’s what Rodric is setting out.” Van den Bogerd agreed.
    “Did you see anything unsavoury in using money in ensuring Mr Griffiths’ case was hushed up?” asked Beer.
    “This was the first I heard of it from Rodric, and the fact that he said it was accepted, then I just allowed it to continue,” Van den Bogerd replied, confirming to the chair that she approved the way the offer was structured.

    Beer wanted to know about the Post Office’s use of NDAs.

    Van den Bogerd said: “Any settlement agreement the Post Office entered into was done with a Non-Disclosure Agreement”.
    “Why?” asked Beer.
    “Because that’s the way they operated, that was always…”
    “But why?” cut in Beer. “Take a step back from the answer of an automaton. Why does the Post Office always insist on Non-Disclosure?”
    “Because that’s how they tied up the agreement…”
    “Yes but why?” pushed Beer.
    “Well I just accepted that that was the standard approach with all settlement agreements and that was how they all operated and still do today I believe
    “Does it like secrecy?” wondered Beer.

    Van den Bogerd failed to give a coherent answer.

    No evidence of theft

    Tim Moloney with the tie and Jo Hamilton on his left

    Tim Moloney KC devoted his allotted slot to questioning Van den Bogerd about her presentation of his client Jo Hamilton’s case to MPs on 18 June 2012. Among the MPs was James Arbuthnot, Jo’s MP. Bogerd agreed she had compiled the information about Jo’s case from looking at the prosecution files. She also agrees this is about the concerns MPs had about the integrity of Horizon and the idea people might have been wrongly convicted.

    Bogerd had prepared a briefing pack containing a timeline of what happened at Jo’s branch in South Warnborough. Jo sat and listened alongside Moloney, as she does most days during the Inquiry. Moloney noted the audit and investigation part of the timeline, he listed the helpline calls, the agreements reached between the Post Office and the branch to settle outstanding discrepancies, then he notes the closing audit, the charge, the admission of false accounting and the eventual sentence.

    “It was meant to be an open and transparent engagement with MPs, wasn’t it?” asked Moloney.
    “Yes.” replied van den Bogerd.

    Moloney pointed out that James Arbuthnot was concerned Jo Hamilton was not guilty. Bogerd agrees. Moloney took her to the front of the briefing pack where Alice Perkins, the new Chair of the Post Office says the purpose of the meeting is to give the MPs “all the information” they have available to address the MPs concerns.

    Moloney then took van den Bogerd to a report written about Jo’s branch by an internal Post Office investigator called Graham Brander. The report noted several things. Firstly that overnight, between the auditor doing an initial check and a subsequent check the next day, a mysterious £61.77 added itself overnight to Jo’s £36,583.12 discrepancy. As the auditor could not explain this, it was just added onto the amount Jo owed.

    Brander also wrote: “I was unable to find any evidence of theft, or that the cash figures had been deliberately inflated.”

    Mrs Hamilton was charged with theft, a charge which was only dropped if she gave the Post Office £36k and made a statement which made clear she was not blaming Horizon for the discrepancies at her branch.

    Moloney wanted to know why those details weren’t in her presentation to Arbuthnot. It led to this exchange.

    “It was a snapshot of what had gone…. I don’t know exactly what I reviewed, but that information isn’t in what I presented.”
    Moloney asked again why the “important… details” he listed did not appear in her summary. Bogerd began to squirm.
    “The detail that you’ve just gone through was not the detail that… was made available to me, so I’ve taken what I understood to be the key points out of the information that was provided to be able to provide that synopsis of what had happened. I didn’t do an investigation at that point.”
    “You didn’t need to do an investigation Mrs Van den Bogerd. The fact that there is no evidence of theft, says Mr Brander, and yet she was still charged with theft. Doesn’t that have to go into your summary so that this MP actually knows what went on with his constituent’s case.”

    Bogerd changed her tune. “I don’t know if that was in the information that was made available to me at the time.”
    Moloney cut in. “It was in the investigation report, Mrs van den Bogerd. You said you read that.”
    Bogerd replied “I read whatever files we had that were available. I don’t know exactly what they were.”

    And on it went. Bogerd was now not sure she read the full investigation files, some of the investigation report, or something completely different. Moloney wondered what documents she might have got her information from if it wasn’t the investigation report. Did she see it or not?

    “I can’t remember exactly what I referred to,” she replied. “I just wanted to present the picture as I saw it from the information I had available.”

    The Chair of the Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams noted her summary just happened to support the Post Office’s perspective.

    “That’s my recollection… I would have expected to have all the information provided to me at the time.” she volunteered, introducing a new mystery person who had come between her and the investigation files. “I don’t even remember who gave me the information.”

    There are people like this in every organisation. They believe they are good people, and, outside of work, they often are, but they would quite happily exercise their corporate power to destroy an individual employee if a company executive demanded it, without it troubling their conscience one iota. And they are well rewarded.

    “Did you get your bonus that year, Mrs van den Bogerd?”

    At the end of the day, Sam Stein KC asked Mrs van den Bogerd about her treatment of Jennifer O’Dell, a woman who was repeatedly told by the Post Office helpline to pay for the discrepancy which appeared in her branch. It is worth reading Mrs O’Dell’s witness statement to the Inquiry to get a sniff of what she was put through. She has PTSD and night terrors.

    Sam Stein (l)

    By this stage Angela van den Bogerd had already agreed that the Post Office’s directions to its helpline operators was to tell people with discrepancies that in the first instance, Subpostmasters were told to make good discrepancies before any investigation as to how they might have occurred was initiated. Mrs O’Dell was repeatedly told to pay up. Angela van den Bogerd was in charge of the helpline. She oversaw a mass theft of Subpostmaster funds, based on an imbalance of power and blatant mis-stating of the terms of the Subpostmaster contract by helpline staff.

    Stein told Bogerd O’Dell claimed that Bogerd was “bullying”, “intimidating” and that her home would be taken away if she didn’t make good the branch discrepancy. Bogerd was adamant this was not her.

    Stein raised the issue of credibility, and the finding made by Mr (now Lord) Justice Fraser in the Common Issues judgment, thus: “Unless I state to the contrary, I would only accept the evidence of Mrs Van den Bogerd and Mr Beal [another Post Office employees] in controversial areas of fact in issue in this Common Issue trial if these are clearly and uncontrovertibly corroborated by contemporaneous documents.”

    Mr Stein wondered if, when it came to clash of evidence, who should be believed. Van den Bogered was again adamant that Mrs O’Dell was mistaken. Stein explored the Post Office’s response to the judge’s finding.

    SS: What was said about you by Mr Justice Fraser was pretty serious, wasn’t it? Condemning you completely out of hand as being someone who simply he can’t trust. And he’s someone who has evaluated your evidence over quite some time in the witness box. It’s a pretty serious thing to hear about yourself, isn’t it?”
    AB: Yes
    SS: And the Post Office was obviously aware of what was being said about you? Yes?
    AB: Yes.
    SS: What did the Post Office do by way of an investigation into this? They must have looked into this. Did they?
    AB: No.
    SS: No? There was no discussion with you about – well hang on, that High Court judge said some pretty rum things about you, surely we should take this seriously. Nothing like that? Nothing ever done?
    AB: No.
    SS: No. I see. Alright. Did you get your bonus that year, in 2019, Mrs van den Bogerd?
    AB: Yes.
    SS: So despite a finding in the High Court – that basically you lied to the High Court – you got your bonus?
    AB: Yes.

    The sort of corporate culture which rewards people after they lied on the company’s behalf in the High Court tells you everything you need to know about that company and the individuals inside it. An organisation which actively supports employees who are evasive, withhold evidence and try to mislead a High Court judge is not that far from a criminal enterprise, which I guess is why it’s under criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police. I don’t even think Angela van den Bogerd is a particularly special case.

    Here’s a write up of part 1 of Angela van den Bogerd’s evidence.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • The First Lady of Flat Earth

    Nick Wallis

    30 comments

    8 min read
    Angela van den Bogerd, on oath once more

    It is possible that Angela van den Bogerd and her senior colleagues (Rodric Williams, Mark Davies, Susan Crichton, Chris Aujard, Jarnail Singh, Patrick Bourke) were just not very bright. They were all aware of evidence which pointed to the exact opposite of what they were telling MPs, Subpostmasters and journalists about potential miscarriages of justice and the Horizon IT system, but they somehow didn’t join up the dots or make the connection. And by not making the connection, they could carry on persuading themselves campaigning Subpostmasters were wrong, or lying, or criminals.

    If you want to scroll through today’s evidence with documents and a real time typed commentary, please go to the live tweet thread on this website.

    This is the fifth day I’ve sat and watched AvdB give evidence on oath. After the first occasion in 2018 she was found to have attempted to mislead a High Court judge. On the second attempt, the judge said “there were no evident attempts on this occasion to mislead me in her oral evidence”, but, “I do not consider that her written evidence had provided plausible explanations. It provided explanations that the Post Office wished to advance… These explanations were not based on the facts.”

    Were AvdB’s explanations based on the facts at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today…?

    Well. Quite early on in the hearing, AvdB was presented with clear evidence that she was told in 2010, 2011 and 2014 that remote access to Subpostmaster branch accounts was possible. This is important because it went to the heart of the Post Office prosecution strategy. If other people could access Subpostmaster branch accounts, hundreds of prosecutions could be unsafe. AvdB told the High Court and the Inquiry she first found out about remote access in 2019 at the earliest.

    AvdB said she did not read the first email to reach her inbox which was explicit about this, sent to her in December 2010. The email was from Lynn Hobbs, who was shortly to leave the business. In it Hobbs wrote:

    “I found out this week that Fujitsu can actually put an entry into a branch account remotely. It came up when we were exploring solutions around a problem generated by the system following migration to HNGX [Horizon Online, rolled out in 2010]… One solution, quickly discounted because of the implications around integrity, was for Fujitsu to remotely enter a value into a branch account to reintroduce the missing loss/gain. So POL [the Post Office] can’t do this but Fujitsu can.”

    AvdB is positive she did not see it. And it’s a very strange email, because it’s cut and pasted into the body of another email.

    Jason Beer said twice today that the Inquiry found this odd, not because it was pasted into the body of another email, but because it was the only evidence the Inquiry had this email existed. The “original” email, sent to Mike Granville and Rod Ismay, could not apparently be found anywhere on the Post Office’s servers. Almost as if the a sensitive email chain containing a clear description of remote access, had been somehow removed from the Post Office’s data records. It would never have surfaced had the email’s contents not been cut and pasted into a different email chain. Funny that.

    Anyway, AvdB was adamant she did not see it. She did admit seeing the 2011 email, which said:

    “Fujitsu can remotely access systems and they do this on numerous occasions on a network wide basis in order to remedy glitches in the system created as a result of new software upgrades” and “Technically, Fujitsu could access an individual branch remotely and move money around however this has never happened yet”.

    Although even that latter statement is untrue (by 2019 we knew Fujitsu had accessed branch data and moved money around on multiple occasions), it still contradicts what AvdB and colleagues told Panorama in 2015 – that there was “no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data”, going back to the beginning of Horizon’s birth.

    AvdB’s excuse was that she hadn’t seen the significance of the 2011 email, or the 2014 email which said:

    “Fujitsu have the ability to impact branch records via the message store”.

    Given it is central to the scandal, that seems a weird position to take. But that is where the senior Post Office witnesses find themselves now, pleading incompetence or lack of awareness, because the alternative is to admit you were deliberately withholding information. And deliberately withholding information which might assist people appeal a conviction is literally perverting the course of justice, a criminal offence.

    Admittedly, AvdB, did a better job than she did at the High Court. There she had to dissemble to maintain a corporate belief. Now that corporate belief has been thoroughly discredited, the only line she had to hold was her own naivety, lack of curiosity, and professional failure when it came to spotting and/or raising the alarm about remote access, and, in one lengthy segment of evidence, bugs in Horizon.

    Corporate thugs

    Dotted throughout the evidence today were written examples of the Post Office’s cultish desire to rebut or deny problems with Horizon and the sheer nastiness towards its agents.

    One “building bridges” meeting with a Subpostmaster and her husband who’d seen a £700 branch discrepancy appear on a dormant terminal was taped, with a Post Office exec trying to insist the conversation was confidential.

    In another, Graham Ward, a Subpostmaster who had ploughed £10,000 of his own money into a black hole in his accounts wondered to his manager if it was Horizon. One internal Post Office response stated:

    “He makes a casual accusation that is extremely serious to the business. As usual he should either produce the evidence for this or withdraw the accusation.”

    The contract means what we want it to mean

    The Post Office’s incessant mis-stating of the Subpostmaster contract terms was infuriating. A Subpostmaster was only liable for discrepancies caused by his/her “carelessness, negligence or error” – something many were never told. AvdB told the Inquiry it was just the way it was. It led to this exchange:

    AB: Back then, the assumption was, if there was a loss in the branch, that it was the responsibility of the Postmaster.
    JB: Why was there an assumption?
    AB: Because it was assumed it was user error.
    JB: I’m sorry?
    AB: Because it was assumed…
    JB: Yes but why? There was a lot of assuming going on.
    AB: I absolutely agree. There was.
    JB: But why? Why does a multimillion pound business make assumptions when it’s got a written contract which prescribes the circumstances where a Subpostmaster was liable.

    AvdB answers that there was no contractual change, in terms of policy or working practices to look into things. Beer was not having it.

    JB: With respect Ms van den Bogerd, that doesn’t really answer the question. Did nobody read the contract and think, hold on, this contract says we can only recover money from Subpostmasters in these limited circumstances. The Subpostmasters have to prove nothing.
    AB: That was the advice we were getting from legal.
    JB: Who in legal?
    AB: Back the it would have been Royal Mail.
    JB: Yes, who in Royal Mail?

    Eventually Bogerd coughs up to Mandy Talbot, Rob Wilson and Rebecca Mantel.

    JB asks: “Was it the case that you very well knew the contract did not entitle the Post Office to recover money from Subpostmasters in any or all circumstances, but that’s what the Post Office pretended it said?”

    AvbB told Beer it was all on legal, who told everyone else what the contract meant.

    Vennells misleads MPs in private

    The final section of the day concerned a readout of a meeting between Alice Perkins (PO Chair), Paula Vennells (PO CEO), AvdB and various MPs led by James Arbuthnot. In the readout of the meeting, Vennells tells the MPs that Subpostmasters can be tempted by the cash in their offices, that “there had not been a case investigated where the Horizon system had been found to be at fault” and “Every case taken to prosecution that involves the Horizon system thus far has found in favour of the Post Office.”

    None of the three statements are found in the briefing pack put together for Paula Vennells and two of the statements are demonstrably false. AvdB tried to tell Beer that Vennells was perhaps emphasising elements of the briefing, until Beer points out that none of the above are in the briefing. The only thing AvdB is sure of is that she had nothing to do with it. She was just there, making up the numbers, failing to stop the untruths being spoken and failing to create them in the first place.

    She’s cleverer than she looks.

    Notes on Angela van den Bogerd’s second day of evidence can be read here.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • Former Post Office Hatchet Man gives himself the chop

    Nick Wallis

    19 comments

    1 min read
    Aujard giving evidence yesterday

    Chris Aujard answered questions at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry yesterday. The day before, he resigned as General Counsel for five separate companies, and the day before that, he chucked it in at another.

    etc etc

    Is it mere coincidence he ceased to be an active director of any UK company within 48 hours of giving evidence at the Inquiry? Perhaps we should be told. FNZ’s insurers almost certainly were.

    Aujard’s former employers, FNZ Wealth (and its various subsidiaries) and iProtect Technologies also appear to have scrubbed any mention of Aujard from their websites. Though FNZ does maintain some delightful guff about its culture.

    I am grateful to an anonymous correspondent for the tip off.

    Can someone get in touch and tell me what they think is likely to be going on?

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  • The Hatchet Man: Aujard gives evidence

    Nick Wallis

    9 comments

    6 min read
    That’s Aujard as in “O, jar” doncha know (usher Jane giving the oath)

    Chris Aujard presents as thoughtful, intelligent and professional – a very different person to the one boasting about his crisis management skills shortly after leaving the Post Office in 2015. Older and wiser, perhaps, or better at image projection.

    Aujard was involved in a deliberate attempt to frustrate Second Sight’s independent investigation into the Post Office, so I’m not going to apportion him much credit, but given some of the truly appalling human beings who have provided evidence to the Inquiry in recent months (hi, Rodric) he did, at least, deserve to be taken seriously.

    Aujard’s great revelation was about Paula Vennells (the Post Office CEO) and her desire to keep prosecuting Subpostmasters beyond 2013. It came after we discovered he had made a recommendation to the Post Office Executive Committee on 12 November 2013 that the Post Office stops prosecuting. When asked why, he said it was “partly informed by both a personal view and a professional view.”

    His professional view was that he did not think “prosecuting was the appropriate way for commercial organisations to deal with their agents”. To give context, Aujard said he came from a financial background “where these types of matters are dealt with in a civil court” or “an HR process”. His personal view was that he “felt that criminal prosecutions caused great distress and anxiety and didn’t have a place in a business such as the Post Office.”

    This, in itself, was a principled stand for an interim appointee to take, and it was adopted by the Post Office’s Executive Committee – which obviously included Paula Vennells – there and then. Astoundingly, at an Audit and Risk Committee (ARC) meeting a week later, Aujard reports Paula Vennells “resiling” from this view. Aujard told the Inquiry Vennells “interjected, or made the comment” that stopping prosecutions entirely was not what the Post Office should be doing. Instead there should be “limited prosecutorial activity” allowing the Post Office to undertake “some prosecutions”.

    In his witness statement, it is minuted the ARC felt a change in prosecution policy:

    “might affect the progress of mediations by ‘raising questions on previous prosecutions, and there was an obvious reluctance to cease prosecutions as ‘in their view this acted as a deterrent’.”

    Aujard states Vennells said the Executive Committee view:

    “was not that POL [Post Office Ltd] would ‘never bring prosecutions, but that [POL] would be more circumspect in the cases it chose to take’.”

    Given Vennells was singled out by Alan Cook as the person who signed off on spending £300k to go after Lee Castleton for a £26k discrepancy, you have to wonder quite what she gets out of putting helpless under-resourced people through the criminal and civil justice system. And shamelessly misrepresenting agreements made in Executive Committee meetings. We have yet to hear Ms Vennells’ point of view on either of the above allegations.

    Keeping the lid on a scandal

    The other two main lines of questioning today concerned Aujard’s failure to hand important information about Horizon’s bugs and poor security over to the Post Office’s contracted criminal law firm Cartwright King (so they could advise on whether or not to disclose them to convicted Subpostmasters), and his attempts to close down or limit Second Sight’s investigation into the Horizon IT system and Post Office business processes.

    Sam Stevens, asking the questions

    We know from recordings made of conversations between Second Sight and Chris Aujard that shortly after his arrival he was told explicitly about likely miscarriages of justice. He didn’t seem that bothered then, and during his questioning today he seemed very keen to distance himself from any prosecutions before his time, telling the Inquiry he was assured by Jarnail Singh and others it was all in hand.

    It is unfortunate the Inquiry chose not to focus on Aujard’s experience of sitting in on the Complaint and Mediation Scheme Working Group meetings and his apparent determination to limit the scope and direction of Second Sight’s investigations (at the Post Office’s instruction), because that, frankly, is where he did the most damage. 

    I am also not alone in being disappointed he was not once asked by the Inquiry to step back from considering the day-to-day management of his in-tray to reflect on the wider nature of the complaints being raised by the Subpostmaster applicants to the Mediation Scheme.

    Aujard had the power and influence to do the right thing. Instead he seemed to spend his time trying to manage Second Sight away from their pursuit of the truth, because of a belief within the Post Office that Ron Warmington and Ian Henderson had gone from being independent investigators to “campaigners” on behalf of Subpostmasters. Or as any sane person would have it, they were not prepared to subscribe unthinkingly to the Post Office’s (flat) worldview.

    Tweets and Screenshots

    You can relive the day’s events by having a scroll through my tweets from today formatted for this website in a single by ThreadReader. It features screenshots and hopefully cogent explanations of some of the day’s big documents. It starts with the remainder of Susan Crichton’s evidence before Aujard begins. As Janet Skinner noted, Crichton seemed to wake up a lot more helpful today than she was being yesterday:

    I admit I was less measured about Crichton’s evidence than I have been about Aujard, which you might see as being unfair. Maybe I was hoping Crichton would give us some genuine insight and revelation and I vented in disappointment when she didn’t. I was expecting what we got from Aujard, and was actually quite impressed he made his mark on the issue of prosecutions. Nonetheless, Crichton tried to do the right thing, and came up against a board determined to discredit her for doing so. Aujard carried out that board’s instruction to the letter, demonstrating even less empathy for the victims of this scandal. Apologies for a possible expectation-based failure to be even-handed.

    I guess Aujard and Crichton’s Post Office experiences also show how an amoral operator can thrive in a malign corporate environment far better than someone who approaches a problem with good intentions. Which is a worry for all of us.

    Aujard will be coming back to the Inquiry to answer questions from representatives of other core participants at an unspecified date.

    I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).

    The journalism on this blog is crowdfunded. If you would like to join the “secret email” newsletter, please consider making a one-off donation. The money is used to keep the contents of this website free. You will receive irregular, but informative email updates about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

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  2. Roderick Ismay FCA needs replacing with Roderick Ismay I D K * I don’t know. How these people get put…