Post Office apologises for not handing over racist files to public inquiry

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THE Post Office has expressed regret for not submitting racist documents to the public inquiry on the Horizon accounting scandal, despite acknowledging they were shared internally, reported The Times.

An inquiry heard that internal documents instructing fraud investigators to categorise potential suspects based on race, including references to “negroid types,” were shared within the company on 23 occasions between 2012 and 2019.

The guidance required investigators to classify postmasters into one of seven racial categories, including ‘dark skinned European types’, ‘Indian/Pakistani types’, and ‘Chinese/Japanese types’. It caused anger among black and Asian postmasters.

According to the report, a request for prosecution documents was made in February last year. However, the guidance only emerged via a freedom of information request by a postmaster campaigner in May this year.

The Horizon inquiry investigates the wrongful prosecution of over 700 postmasters, who were accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting when the missing money was actually a result of numerous flaws in the Post Office’s £1 billion IT system.

The request for documents was made under the Inquiries Act 2005, which gave the chairman, Sir Wyn Williams, statutory powers to compel evidence.

Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, termed the failure in the Post Office’s disclosure a scandal within other scandals.

“This inquiry is itself an investigation into pervasive disclosure failures that lasted over a decade and sent people to prison,” he said.

The Times report said that documents described Seema Misra, 47, who was wrongly sentenced to 15 months in prison while pregnant, as ‘Indian/Pakistani types . . . ie Asian, etc’.

Post Office’s general counsel, Ben Foat, acknowledged that the documents should have undoubtedly been provided to the inquiry and offered his apology.

“I recognise that there are a number of areas where we have fallen short and I do apologise to the inquiry and especially to the core participants,” he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Foat further said that the document containing the race codes ‘was never formally updated or replaced’.

The public inquiry heard that staff members referred to Asian postmasters seeking assistance with the Horizon IT system as ‘another Patel scamming’.

The Post Office has made a commitment to address the situation by conducting a more comprehensive search, which may result in an additional 1,500 documents being submitted to the inquiry, the report added.

Interestingly, in May, Post Office executives revealed that they received a bonus for their support of the inquiry, including the timely disclosure of documents.

Chief executive Nick Read received a payout of £455,000, partially based on the assertion that the Post Office had assisted the inquiry in meeting its expected timeline.

Now, Read issued an apology and vowed to return £13,600 out of the £455,000.

Last week, Darren Jones, the chairman of the Commons business select committee, called for Read to reimburse an additional £30,400 from his bonus, which was also tied to performance related to the inquiry.