The detectives running the investigation into possible criminal activity at the Post Office have indicated that former Post Office General Counsel, Jane MacLeod, is a “significant individual” to their criminal investigation.

Operation Olympos is a long-running police investigation formed in the wake of the Bates v Post Office civil litigation. It used to be headed up by the Metropolitan Police, but since 2024 it has been led by the National Police Chiefs Council. The inference about MacLeod was made during an NPCC remote briefing for victims of the scandal which was held yesterday and hosted by Commander Stephen Clayman and Senior Investigating Officer Mick Norman. I have heard a partial recording of the briefing.

In response to a written question, which he did not read out, Norman said “this is obviously a reference to… that individual”. He said he would not name names, as it would be “unfair”, but added “we all know who we’re talking about”. He went on to essentially confirm who he was talking about when he noted the individual “didn’t engage with the public inquiry”.

Jane MacLeod was scheduled to be questioned at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on 3 and 4 June 2024, but refused to leave her native Australia to do so. She was last seen trying to evade a BBC reporter. A statutory inquiry has powers to compel people to attend, but only if they are resident in the UK.

In a statement released in May 2024, the chair of the Post Office Inquiry, Sir Wyn Williams, said MacLeod had “made it clear that she will not co-operate with the Inquiry by providing oral evidence, whether by attending the Inquiry in person or by giving evidence remotely via live video link”.

Questions to Answer

Jane MacLeod was a key figure in what the police yesterday called the “containment or cover-up” phase of the scandal which loosely runs from 2013 to 2019. MacLeod became Post Office General Counsel in 2015 and remained there until she was sacked in 2019. She undoubtedly has questions to answer.

Norman indicated that no one would escape the police investigation, and “when we get to that point where there’s the lack of engagement and there’s a need to engage, we have the capability of… police-to-police cooperation and CPS engagement to actually reach out to the unreachable.”

This may not mean extradition, but “arrangements” which would allow Op Olympos “potentially to question them out there in some way [or] on our behalf. There’s different ways of doing it.”

Incrimination

Whilst Clayman and Norman deliberately avoided using MacLeod’s name, it’s hard to see who else they could be talking about. The phrase “significant individual” is also interesting. Previously, Op Olympos has divided the people it is looking at into “suspects” and “persons of interest”. As of yesterday, the police have identified and interviewed seven people who they now deem suspects. As of November last year, that number stood at four. The remainder – currently 46 – are “persons of interest”. We can assume MacLeod is a “significant” one of the latter group, as we can infer from the briefing yesterday that she has yet to be interviewed.

As for who the other suspects and persons of interest are – this may not be too difficult to work out. Operation Olympos is a core participant to the Inquiry and we know they have been sharing information with the Inquiry team. During yesterday’s briefing, Mick Norman said Operation Olympos had “identified those individuals” among the witnesses who should be given the warning against self-incrimination by the Inquiry chair before they answered questions. That warning states that “if you believe the answer you would give to a question may be used as evidence that you have committed a criminal offence, you need not answer that question.”

Witnesses who received a warning against self-incrimination include former Post Office Chair, Alice Perkins, former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells and her sidekick Angela van den Bogerd, former Post Office Head of Security John Scott, former Head of Product and Branch Accounting Rod Ismay, former Post Office lawyers Jarnail Singh and Rob Wilson, former Fujitsu engineers Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers (whose evidence in previous court cases prompted the chain of events which led to the founding of Operation Olympos in January 2020), former Post Office investigators Graham Ward and Stephen Bradshaw and former Fujitsu Cryptographic Key “Manager” Andy Dunks.*

All the above-named people are innocent until proven guilty, and it looks like we are several years away from any charges being laid. Yesterday the NPCC said unless the government gave it a significant uplift in extra funding to meet its 2026/7 budget of £19.3m “and beyond”, the investigation was in trouble. Commander Clayman said “we need to double the size of the investigation team from 111 to 210. Without this, we risk our timelines being pushed back by as much as five years”.

Talks with the Home Office are ongoing. It seems Jane MacLeod et al can sleep easily in their beds for a while yet.

* There were also a few witnesses I was very surprised didn’t get a self-incrimination warning, but that may have been an oversight.

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