It is possible that Angela van den Bogerd and her senior colleagues (Rodric Williams, Mark Davies, Susan Crichton, Chris Aujard, Jarnail Singh, Patrick Bourke) were just not very bright. They were all aware of evidence which pointed to the exact opposite of what they were telling MPs, Subpostmasters and journalists about potential miscarriages of justice and the Horizon IT system, but they somehow didn’t join up the dots or make the connection. And by not making the connection, they could carry on persuading themselves campaigning Subpostmasters were wrong, or lying, or criminals.
If you want to scroll through today’s evidence with documents and a real time typed commentary, please go to the live tweet thread on this website.
This is the fifth day I’ve sat and watched AvdB give evidence on oath. After the first occasion in 2018 she was found to have attempted to mislead a High Court judge. On the second attempt, the judge said “there were no evident attempts on this occasion to mislead me in her oral evidence”, but, “I do not consider that her written evidence had provided plausible explanations. It provided explanations that the Post Office wished to advance… These explanations were not based on the facts.”
Were AvdB’s explanations based on the facts at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today…?
Well. Quite early on in the hearing, AvdB was presented with clear evidence that she was told in 2010, 2011 and 2014 that remote access to Subpostmaster branch accounts was possible. This is important because it went to the heart of the Post Office prosecution strategy. If other people could access Subpostmaster branch accounts, hundreds of prosecutions could be unsafe. AvdB told the High Court and the Inquiry she first found out about remote access in 2019 at the earliest.
AvdB said she did not read the first email to reach her inbox which was explicit about this, sent to her in December 2010. The email was from Lynn Hobbs, who was shortly to leave the business. In it Hobbs wrote:
“I found out this week that Fujitsu can actually put an entry into a branch account remotely. It came up when we were exploring solutions around a problem generated by the system following migration to HNGX [Horizon Online, rolled out in 2010]… One solution, quickly discounted because of the implications around integrity, was for Fujitsu to remotely enter a value into a branch account to reintroduce the missing loss/gain. So POL [the Post Office] can’t do this but Fujitsu can.”
AvdB is positive she did not see it. And it’s a very strange email, because it’s cut and pasted into the body of another email.
Jason Beer said twice today that the Inquiry found this odd, not because it was pasted into the body of another email, but because it was the only evidence the Inquiry had this email existed. The “original” email, sent to Mike Granville and Rod Ismay, could not apparently be found anywhere on the Post Office’s servers. Almost as if the a sensitive email chain containing a clear description of remote access, had been somehow removed from the Post Office’s data records. It would never have surfaced had the email’s contents not been cut and pasted into a different email chain. Funny that.
Anyway, AvdB was adamant she did not see it. She did admit seeing the 2011 email, which said:
“Fujitsu can remotely access systems and they do this on numerous occasions on a network wide basis in order to remedy glitches in the system created as a result of new software upgrades” and “Technically, Fujitsu could access an individual branch remotely and move money around however this has never happened yet”.
Although even that latter statement is untrue (by 2019 we knew Fujitsu had accessed branch data and moved money around on multiple occasions), it still contradicts what AvdB and colleagues told Panorama in 2015 – that there was “no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data”, going back to the beginning of Horizon’s birth.
AvdB’s excuse was that she hadn’t seen the significance of the 2011 email, or the 2014 email which said:
“Fujitsu have the ability to impact branch records via the message store”.
Given it is central to the scandal, that seems a weird position to take. But that is where the senior Post Office witnesses find themselves now, pleading incompetence or lack of awareness, because the alternative is to admit you were deliberately withholding information. And deliberately withholding information which might assist people appeal a conviction is literally perverting the course of justice, a criminal offence.
Admittedly, AvdB, did a better job than she did at the High Court. There she had to dissemble to maintain a corporate belief. Now that corporate belief has been thoroughly discredited, the only line she had to hold was her own naivety, lack of curiosity, and professional failure when it came to spotting and/or raising the alarm about remote access, and, in one lengthy segment of evidence, bugs in Horizon.
Corporate thugs
Dotted throughout the evidence today were written examples of the Post Office’s cultish desire to rebut or deny problems with Horizon and the sheer nastiness towards its agents.
One “building bridges” meeting with a Subpostmaster and her husband who’d seen a £700 branch discrepancy appear on a dormant terminal was taped, with a Post Office exec trying to insist the conversation was confidential.
In another, Graham Ward, a Subpostmaster who had ploughed £10,000 of his own money into a black hole in his accounts wondered to his manager if it was Horizon. One internal Post Office response stated:
“He makes a casual accusation that is extremely serious to the business. As usual he should either produce the evidence for this or withdraw the accusation.”
The contract means what we want it to mean
The Post Office’s incessant mis-stating of the Subpostmaster contract terms was infuriating. A Subpostmaster was only liable for discrepancies caused by his/her “carelessness, negligence or error” – something many were never told. AvdB told the Inquiry it was just the way it was. It led to this exchange:
AB: Back then, the assumption was, if there was a loss in the branch, that it was the responsibility of the Postmaster.
JB: Why was there an assumption?
AB: Because it was assumed it was user error.
JB: I’m sorry?
AB: Because it was assumed…
JB: Yes but why? There was a lot of assuming going on.
AB: I absolutely agree. There was.
JB: But why? Why does a multimillion pound business make assumptions when it’s got a written contract which prescribes the circumstances where a Subpostmaster was liable.
AvdB answers that there was no contractual change, in terms of policy or working practices to look into things. Beer was not having it.
JB: With respect Ms van den Bogerd, that doesn’t really answer the question. Did nobody read the contract and think, hold on, this contract says we can only recover money from Subpostmasters in these limited circumstances. The Subpostmasters have to prove nothing.
AB: That was the advice we were getting from legal.
JB: Who in legal?
AB: Back the it would have been Royal Mail.
JB: Yes, who in Royal Mail?
Eventually Bogerd coughs up to Mandy Talbot, Rob Wilson and Rebecca Mantel.
JB asks: “Was it the case that you very well knew the contract did not entitle the Post Office to recover money from Subpostmasters in any or all circumstances, but that’s what the Post Office pretended it said?”
AvbB told Beer it was all on legal, who told everyone else what the contract meant.
Vennells misleads MPs in private
The final section of the day concerned a readout of a meeting between Alice Perkins (PO Chair), Paula Vennells (PO CEO), AvdB and various MPs led by James Arbuthnot. In the readout of the meeting, Vennells tells the MPs that Subpostmasters can be tempted by the cash in their offices, that “there had not been a case investigated where the Horizon system had been found to be at fault” and “Every case taken to prosecution that involves the Horizon system thus far has found in favour of the Post Office.”
None of the three statements are found in the briefing pack put together for Paula Vennells and two of the statements are demonstrably false. AvdB tried to tell Beer that Vennells was perhaps emphasising elements of the briefing, until Beer points out that none of the above are in the briefing. The only thing AvdB is sure of is that she had nothing to do with it. She was just there, making up the numbers, failing to stop the untruths being spoken and failing to create them in the first place.
She’s cleverer than she looks.
Notes on Angela van den Bogerd’s second day of evidence can be read here.
I am currently touring Post Office Scandal – the Inside Story. Please do come and see us as we make our way around the country (all dates here).
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