Post office scandal: Inquiry chief gives jail warning to senior officials over Horizon IT evidence delays

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https://inews.co.uk/news/post-office-sc ... TO=newsnow

Chair of inquiry into sub-postmasters’ ordeal blasts Post Office as he hears it has taken 18 months to provide some documents

Senior Post Office officials have been threatened with criminal sanctions, including jail, if they do not hand over key documents to a public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal.

Sir Wyn Williams, chair of the inquiry, has accused the Post Office of “grossly unsatisfactory” disclosure failings that have severely ­delayed the inquiry.

It was set up to investigate the wrongful prosecution and conviction of hundreds of sub-postmasters between 2000 and 2013 due to faults in a computer system.


The former High Court judge said that in future, requests for evidence would carry a notice under Section 21 of the Inquiries Act 2005, which requires people to comply and “carries a threat of a criminal sanction”, including a sentence of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment.

Sir Wyn said he was not surprised that many sub-postmasters believe the Post Office disclosure failings are deliberate. “Failure to disclose crucial information about the Horizon computer system led to the quashing of ­criminal convictions in the Court of Appeal,” he said.

“It would be remiss of me to fail to guard against the possibility there are those who are engaged in the process of disclosure on behalf of the Post Office who are unwilling or unable to comply strictly with requests for disclosure of documents made of them by the inquiry.”

He will also now hold regular hearings to discuss the disclosure of evidence throughout the remainder of the inquiry. He said the hearings had become necessary because of the “significant” disclosure failures.

The inquiry has been forced to act after repeated delays by the Post Office in providing documents. The delays resulted in an adjournment of the inquiry’s proceedings and hearings planned for this month have had to be rescheduled.

The inquiry was told the Post Office has taken 18 months to provide documents in some cases.

A total of 736 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office for theft and fraud between 2000 and 2015, after alleged discrepancies emerged in reconciling the sub-post office financial accounts after the new Fujitsu-designed Horizon software computerised the system.

Unable to explain the cash shortfalls the system found, hundreds were punished – many served jail sentences, or were bankrupted or ruined financially.

Hundreds of sub-postmasters later successfully challenged the Post Office in a High Court legal case, which demonstrated the software was riddled with errors which the Post Office were aware of but continued to blame individual sub-postmasters and prosecute them.

More than 80 sub-postmasters have had their criminal convictions overturned so far with many cases still to be heard.