A lawyer in the Post Office’s criminal law team was sent evidence of a bug in the Horizon IT system three days before a postmistress went on trial.
A report sent to Jarnail Singh just before Seema Misra’s trial said that the system bug had resulted in quantities of cash simply disappearing at dozens of branches, the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry was told.
Misra, the postmistress of West Byfleet post office in Surrey, was jailed for 15 months for theft in autumn 2010 while eight weeks pregnant. She has previously said she would have killed herself were it not for her unborn child. Her conviction was overturned in 2021. The £74,600 shortfall was caused by the faulty IT system.
She was one of more than 700 post office managers to have been wrongly prosecuted for fraud, theft and false accounting. Victims were left in financial and emotional ruin as they were stripped of their businesses and dragged through the courts and have spent 15 years pursuing justice.
• Post Office scandal explained: what is the Horizon IT saga about?
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Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, said the newly revealed emails suggested that the Post Office knew about widespread bugs in 2010 but kept them hidden in a “cover-up”.
Singh denied this, claiming that he never saw the report, even though evidence showed that the document revealing the bug was saved to his drive and printed out nine minutes after he received the email.
He agreed that the document in the email, which was marked with importance “high”, should have rung “alarm bells” but said that he could not have saved it to his drive because he did not know how to do so.
Beer asked: “What you’re engaged in now is you’re closing your mind to the possibility that you saw this, blind denial, because you know this is evidence of your own guilty knowledge.”
Singh replied: “That is not true. If I had seen it I would have seen it, then I would have dealt with it … I don’t recall receiving it, or seeing it, or printing it, that is my evidence on oath.”
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Beer said: “All this, ‘If I read it, if I received it’, is a big fat lie, and you know it Mr Singh.”
Singh replied: “I didn’t come here to lie.” He added later: “There was no cover-up on my part, and never will be and never has been.”
Misra, who was at the inquiry on Friday, said: “It’s horrible. It just makes me more and more angry. At least my defence team would have had a clearer picture, they could have asked questions, and maybe I would not have gone to jail.”
• Who is responsible for the Post Office scandal?
The bugs report was contained in an email sent on October 8, 2010 by a senior member of the security team who ran investigations into postmasters. Misra’s trial began the following Monday, October 11.
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The email read: “I am forwarding you the attachments above in relation to a series of incidents, identified by Fujitsu this week, whereby it appears that when posting discrepancies to the local suspense, these amounts simply disappear at branch level, and a balance is shown.”
It added that “one or more” of the proposed solutions “may have repercussions in any future prosecution cases and on the integrity of the Horizon Online system”.
Rob Wilson, the head of criminal prosecutions at the Post Office, forwarded the email to Singh at 4.29pm, adding “FYI”, meaning for your information. The report about the bug was then printed at 4.38pm, records show.
In January the Metropolitan Police, who have special status at the inquiry to receive documents, announced that it had opened an investigation into possible fraud offences at the Post Office.
The force is already investigating two IT experts who worked for Fujitsu as part of a perjury investigation, including Gareth Jenkins, who gave evidence in Misra’s trial.
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This week it emerged that he failed to include his knowledge of a “back door” to Horizon accounts in his evidence to the court, despite writing a report about it days earlier.
Jenkins’s witness statement to the trial, obtained by the BBC, said there were “no cases” where branch accounts could be altered without postmasters’ knowledge. But his report — the same document that was being considered at the public inquiry on Friday — proposed remotely altering data in branches to fix the bug.
Jenkins’s report read that changing branch accounts remotely “could lead to questions of ‘tampering’ with the branch system”.
This is significant because, according to postmaster lawyers, a jury would have been less likely to convict if they knew that branch accounts could be changed without postmasters’ knowledge.
A lawyer for Jenkins previously declined to comment, saying it would be “inappropriate” to do so before his evidence to the inquiry in June.
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On Friday afternoon, Singh was accused of “covering up” a separate miscarriage of justice in 2014.
An email shown to the inquiry from Singh to Chris Aujard, the Post Office general counsel, said that the investigation report in the case of the convicted postmistress Jo Hamilton should not be disclosed because “this would give the applicant and Second Sight every opportunity to ask why in fact Hamilton was prosecuted”.
He quotes the relevant section of the investigation report, from 2009, which said: “Having analysed the Horizon print out and accounting documentation, I was unable to find any evidence of theft, or cash in hand figures being deliberately inflated.”
Hamilton was charged with theft and ultimately pleaded guilty to false accounting, and only saw her conviction overturned in 2021.
In response to being shown the email, Singh said, “I can’t explain that now”, but denied it was “part of a cover-up”.
