Post Office lawyer ‘lied to cover up knowledge of IT bugs’
A FORMER top Post Office lawyer knew of bugs in the Horizon IT system which resulted in account discrepancies days before legal proceedings which saw a pregnant subpostmistress jailed began and subsequently lied to “cover up” that fact, an inquiry has heard.
Senior in-house lawyer Jarnail Singh was copied into an email containing a report which identified the glitch but denied knowledge of it for years – despite saving the document and printing it out, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry heard. Mr Singh, who denied the claims, was a senior lawyer at the Post Office and became head of criminal law in 2012 after it split with Royal Mail.
The report, sent to Mr Singh just three days before Seema Misra’s case began in October 2010, described a bug “that will result in a receipts payment mismatch” and offered an explanation for apparent cases of theft among subpostmasters, counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC said.
Ms Misra was eight weeks’ pregnant when she was handed a 15-month prison sentence on her son’s 10th birthday in November 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000 from her branch in West Byfleet, Surrey.
Her conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
Mr Singh said he “wasn’t made aware” of the report, written by Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins and forwarded to lawyers Mr Singh and Juliet Macfarlane by Rob Wilson, then head of criminal law at the Post Office.
But Mr Beer said a file address on the bottom of the document, which included Mr Singh’s name, showed the lawyer had both saved the report to his drive and printed it out only nine minutes later.
Mr Beer accused Mr Singh of telling “a big fat lie” to the inquiry and of having failed to disclose important information to the defence or court ahead of Ms Misra’s prosecution, asking: “You’d known about the bug all along hadn’t you, Mr Singh?” The lawyer responded: “No, that’s not true.”
Errors in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system meant money appeared to be missing from many branch accounts when, in fact, it was not. As a result, more than 700 subpostmasters were handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015.