An investigator accused of acting like a “mafia gangster” when securing false convictions against post office operators has admitted softer charges were offered in exchange for silence over the culpability of the Horizon IT system.
In several instances, the accused were told they could avoid a jail sentence if they kept quiet about the accounting system’s faults, as part of an aggressive strategy by the Post Office to protect their cases as they pursued them in the courts.
Giving evidence at a public inquiry in central London into one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice, Stephen Bradshaw – who remains employed by the Post Office, where he has worked since 1978 – denied calling one female suspect a “bitch” while working as a fraud investigator, but admitted to accusing another of telling a “pack of lies” during what he conceded were “not nice” interviews.
He further conceded that he had known of claims that the Horizon accounting system was at fault for discrepancies in branches’ accounts “from the beginning” but added that he had not received orders from the top to stop the prosecutions.
Edward Henry KC, who represents some of those falsely accused, said: “Mr Bradshaw, contrary to what you say, you and your department, the security department, were drenched in information that Horizon wasn’t working from the very beginning.”
“The information came through, yes,” Bradshaw replied.
He conceded it was “probably” wrong that Post Office lawyers offered more lenient charges to those who stated in court that there was “nothing wrong with Horizon”.
Bradshaw’s questioning at the public inquiry, which is now in its third year, had been delayed for months due to a failure by the Post Office to fully disclose documents relating to the scandal, some of which were pored over on Thursday.
The Post Office’s legal representative will be questioned on Friday after the chair of the inquiry, the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, raised the question of whether documents had been deliberately hidden.
In one apparently incriminating self-appraisal form seen by the public inquiry on Thursday, Bradshaw boasted of pushing for a post office operator who had made claims against Horizon to be charged with both accounting fraud and theft, as leniency “would give credence to the current campaign by former sub postmasters”.
Julian Blake, counsel for the inquiry, asked if this had been said to secure a bonus. Bradshaw said protecting the Post Office’s interest “may” have led to cash bonuses for him, but it “depends on who looks at the forms”, adding that his boast had been “flamboyant”.
He also conceded during questioning that he had signed a witness statement in 2012, which he had not written, in which he had testified to the court about his “absolute confidence” in the Horizon IT system, despite not being “technically minded”.
The statement had actually been drafted by external lawyers Cartwright King, with editing by the Post Office’s head of PR, Ronan Kelleher. “In hindsight … there probably should have been another line stating: ‘These are not my words’,” Bradshaw said.
Earlier this week, the postal affairs minister, Kevin Hollinrake, told the Commons that between 1999 and 2015 a total of 900 post office operators had been convicted of crimes relating to theft, false accounting and fraud, based on faulty information from a computer system which erroneously suggested that money had gone missing from post office branch accounts.
Of those, 95 cases have been overturned in the court of appeal, but on Wednesday the government said it would legislate to exonerate all of those involved after a public outcry over the scandal.
The Post Office has been accused of maliciously prosecuting the workers even as evidence had mounted of the Horizon system’s faults, but Bradshaw denied claims submitted to the inquiry of “bullying” behaviour during the interviews he conducted with the accused under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
Jacqueline McDonald, who was sentenced in 2011 to 18 months’ imprisonment and handed a confiscation order for the sum of £99,759.60, accused Post Office investigators, including Bradshaw, of “behaving like mafia gangsters” in a witness statement.
The inquiry heard extracts of an interview Bradshaw conducted with McDonald. Bradshaw had asked her to tell him what happened to the money, to which she responded: “I don’t know where the money is, I’ve told you.” He had responded: “You have told me a pack of lies.”
Blake suggested it was language “you might see in [a] 1970s television detective show”.
Bradshaw responded that the interview had not been seen as “oppressive” by the defence when the case came to trial. He also denied telling McDonald that she was the only one using the Horizon system to suffer apparent shortages, an accusation made by 49 other operators of their Post Office interrogators.
“I refute the allegation that I am a liar,” Bradshaw told the inquiry, adding: “Ms Jacqueline McDonald is also incorrect in stating Post Office investigators behaved like mafia gangsters looking to collect their bounty with the threats and lies.”
Bradshaw was also accused by a Merseyside post office operator, Rita Threlfall, of asking her for the colour of her eyes and what jewellery she was wearing before saying “good, so we’ve got a description of you for when they come” during her interview under caution in August 2010.
Shazia Saddiq, who was wrongly accused of stealing £40,000 from the Post Office, claimed Bradshaw had hounded her and called her a “bitch” during a telephone call in 2016, “which I found extremely distressing”. Bradshaw said the claims were “completely untrue”.
It further emerged that Bradshaw had been asked in a separate case whether it was worth spending £2,500 to carry out a data trawl that could verify one of the accused’s claims about Horizon’s glitches. The extra work was not undertaken. Bradshaw said he could not explain the document trail. He denied acting unprofessionally.
