A barrister who investigated the Post Office’s review of prosecutions of sub-postmasters and found no failures in that review has said the information he relied upon was later shown to be “catastrophically incorrect”.
Brian Altman KC’s review in 2013 found that its investigations were handled in a “well-organised, structured and efficient manner, through an expert and dedicated team of in-house investigators and lawyers”.
In his review, he wrote that Post Office and its advisers were “wholly unaware” that evidence existed that might have cleared sub-postmasters.
The Post Office would go on to use Altman’s words to defend itself against negative reports in the media.
In a hearing of the Post Office inquiry on Wednesday, he said his conclusion at the time demonstrated a “remarkable insight into my ignorance and what I was not told and didn’t understand”.
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He told the inquiry: “What I discovered in later years, from the Horizon issues trial onwards, was that the landscape was entirely different. Individuals in the Post Office were very well sighted on all of the problems.”
Altman added it was “unhappily” the case that sub-postmasters were not told about an expert witness withholding information about bugs in the accounting system.
• Will the Post Office inquiry deliver justice at last?
The barrister was also questioned about Gareth Jenkins, a leading Horizon engineer who gave live evidence in a trial of the sub-postmistress Seema Misra, who was later sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2010 while eight weeks pregnant.
Altman said that based on facts he himself was aware of when he was instructed in October 2013, Jenkins had “possibly” committed perjury while giving evidence in the trial.
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Speaking of his failure to disclose Jenkins’s knowledge of bugs in the system, he told the inquiry: “I just missed it, it’s as simple as that. It is hard to look back and think, how on earth did I miss that?”
During the hearing, Altman was also presented with an attendance note from September 2013.
It recorded that he advised the Post Office to adopt “considerable caution” when involving previously convicted sub-postmasters, including Misra, in a scheme to investigate their cases and have them reviewed by independent investigators.
He was recorded as revealing “concern that lawyers acting for those individuals may be using the scheme to obtain information which they would not normally be entitled to in order to pursue an appeal”.
Altman “categorically” denied that he expressed this concern, and added that his review was never intended as a “deep dive” into the Post Office’s investigation procedure.
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Emails shown to the inquiry showed that the Post Office was keen to employ Altman because he had “the ear” of the director of public prosecutions and the attorney-general following his stint as first senior Treasury counsel between 2010 and 2013.
Altman said he never made use of those connections for the Post Office.
• Post Office investigations team that refused to play by the rules
Following the publication of his review in 2013, lawyers from Bond Dickinson LLP boasted it gave the Post Office “good grounds to resist any formal external review of historic prosecutions” by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Altman was quizzed over why he described the alleged shredding of notes from weekly Horizon meetings on the orders of Post Office head of security John Scott as a “cultural” issue and a “teething problem”.
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Asked whether he took any actions about these practices, Altman said he had not used the correct words and had been assured it had been overcome at the time.
More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the government-owned organisation and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 because Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at branches.
Hundreds of sub-postmasters are awaiting compensation despite the government announcing that those who have had convictions quashed are eligible for a £600,000 payout.
