The former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells did not believe there had been miscarriages of justice, the Horizon inquiry has heard, as the current finance boss said the company looked like “corporate bullies” in the way it dealt with branch operators.
Alisdair Cameron, the Post Office chief financial officer who joined the board in 2015, told the inquiry on Friday that Vennells had been “clear in her conviction” that nothing had gone wrong with Horizon.
He was testifying to the public inquiry examining how the state-owned body had prosecuted and hounded post office operators for more than a decade for financial shortfalls in their branch accounts that turned out to be down to problems with its Horizon IT system.
The inquiry also heard on Friday that the Post Office’s former general counsel Jane MacLeod was refusing to testify and cooperate.
Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, asked Cameron about a review commissioned in 2016-17 by the then Post Office chair, Tim Parker, to investigate complaints by branch operators. Cameron said he did not see the report because he was told by MacLeod, who was general counsel from 2015 to 2019, that the document was covered by legal privilege.
“We’re not going to hear from her,” Beer told the inquiry. “She lives abroad and won’t cooperate.”
Cameron was earlier asked about an internal document, titled What Went Wrong, which he wrote in November 2020 – months after the Post Office paid nearly £58m to settle a high court lawsuit over Horizon brought by the campaigner Alan Bates and 554 other post office operators. An estimated £46m was immediately swallowed up in legal fees.
In the document, which was intended for the new Post Office chief executive, Nick Read, he wrote that Vennells “did not believe there had been a miscarriage [of justice] and could not have got there emotionally”.
The inquiry barrister Jason Beer KC asked Cameron why he thought Vennells believed there had been no miscarriages of justice.
Cameron replied: “Everything she said at the time. She seemed clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong and it was very clearly stated in my very first board meeting. She never, in my observation, deviated from that or seemed to particularly doubt that.”
In the November 2020 document, Cameron, who joined the state-owned body in 2015 and who has been off on medical leave since March 2023, wrote that the “original sin of the Post Office” was that “our culture, self-absorbed and defensive, stopped us from dealing with postmasters in a straightforward and acceptable way”.
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He added that the Post Office was “over-reliant on Horizon and knew its weaknesses” and said he now agreed with criticisms that instead of fighting the high court lawsuit the company “should have settled the claims, apologised and moved on”. He added: “We should have been tackling these issues 10 years ago.”
Cameron told the inquiry that after the Post Office had lost the first part of the court case in early 2019, it was a “seismic moment” because “the judge was extremely critical, and I thought that was a real moment to stand back and reflect and the legal advice was, ‘No … it’s the judge that’s the problem. We are not changing our position at all,’” he said.
There had been debate internally in 2018 about whether the Post Office should use a larger law firm to fight the high court case rather than deploying its existing external law firm Womble Bond Dickinson but executives concluded that a “more assertive” City law firm might make the Post Office look like “corporate bullies”, he told the hearing.
Cameron said: “The postmasters just had better lawyers than us was my emotional reaction … whereas if we had employed a really big aggressive City firm with that reputation we would have looked like corporate bullies. But my feeling is actually we looked like corporate bullies anyway given the size of the Post Office.”
Cameron apologised to Post Office operatives before he started his evidence at the inquiry and also in his witness statement, saying he was “sorry that I accepted that Horizon was working effectively too easily at the time, and for the time that it took us to shift focus from the commercial performance of the business to the experience of postmasters”.
The inquiry continues. Paula Vennells will testify next week for three days from 22 May.
