Post Office sacking of forensic accountants was ‘disgusting’
campaigner fighting for justice in the Horizon scandal has branded the Post Office’s secret decision to sack independent forensic accountants who found bugs in their IT system as “disgusting”.
Former subpost mistress Jo Hamilton said the move, uncovered in documents seen by the Bbc, was like “tip ping the board up when you’re losing” a game of Monopoly.
The decision was unearthed in minutes from a Post Office board sub-committee meeting in April 2014, named Project Sparrow, which the broadcaster said was with the full knowledge of Government.
Ms Hamilton, who was wrongfully convicted in 2008 of stealing thousands of pounds from a village shop in Hampshire, described it as a “massive cover-up”, adding: “We knew the Government were in it up to their necks.”
The BBC said minutes from a meeting on April 9, 2014, showed the sub-committee asking for a paper to be prepared on the independent forensic accountants who were from a firm called Second Sight.
The sub-committee also asked for “options to support them or reduce their role”.
Second Sight submitted a report in July 2013 which identified bugs that raised concerns over the reliability of Horizon data used to prosecute subpostmasters. The Post Office was warned it was in breach of its legal duties as prosecutedsub post masters should have been told about the bugs, but the board later expressed cona cern the review from the forensic accountants exposed them to wrongful conviction claims.
Three weeks after the first meeting, the sub-committee took the decision to bring the investigation of subpostmasters’ cases “within the control of the Post Office” and removed Second Sight from its role of investigating the cases independently, the BBC said.
Ms hamilton said“it’ s so wicked” that the documents showed the Post Office planned to pay a total of only £1 million in “token payments” to subpostmasters.
Heavily-redacted versions of the documents were made public in 2021 but the BBC has now seen the minutes of the meetings without redactions.
Reacting to the unearthed minutes from the 2014 meeting, Ms Hamilton said: “It just confirms everything we know.
“We knew the Government were in it up to their necks. We just knew, I knew Project Sparrow and we never had the names, but you can kind of guess who’s on it. You can then say to all the business ministers ‘who didn’t know about this, honestly?’ because everyone has to have known – right up to the top, I believe.”
Speaking about the sacking of independent forensic accountants, Ms Hamilton said: “It doesn’t surprise me... I mean, it is disgusting. The Government are in this up to their necks and they’ve clearly thought ‘oh my god, quick’ – it’s like Monopoly, isn’t it, tipping the board up when you’re losing. It’s a massive cover-up.”
A Post Office spokesman said: “It is not appropriate for the Post Office to comment on allegations being made outside of the inquiry, whose role it is to consider all of the evidence on the issues it is examining and independently reach conclusions.”