A former Post Office lawyer has denied “covering up” knowledge of problems with the Horizon IT system after a public inquiry heard that he “sat on” an email highlighting IT bugs, which was not disclosed to the criminal trial of a pregnant post office operator.
Jarnail Singh, the former head of criminal law at the Post Office, was being questioned at the long-running public inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch owner-operators who were hounded by the Post Office because of financial shortfalls in their branch accounts. It has since emerged that these discrepancies were due to IT bugs in the company’s Horizon computer system.
The inquiry heard on Friday that Singh received an email on 8 October 2010 highlighting IT problems with Horizon – only days before the start of the criminal trial of Seema Misra, who was jailed in 2010. Misra was sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant. Her conviction was among those overturned by the court of appeal in 2021.
The email forwarded to Singh on 8 October 2010 was written by another Post Office executive, Alan Simpson, who highlighted “a series of incidents” whereby “it appears that when posting discrepancies to the local suspense [account] these amounts simply disappear at branch level”.
Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, told Singh that the 2010 email should have “rung alarm bells” because it highlighted money was shown as disappearing from the Horizon system at branch level. However, the email was never disclosed to Misra’s defence lawyers before her 2010 trial, which began the following week.
Singh told the inquiry: “I don’t remember seeing the email … [or] the attachments to it at all … From memory I don’t recall this document.”
Beer told the inquiry that the document had been saved to Singh’s computer and had been printed out minutes after it was received. He put to Singh: “What you are engaged in now is closing your mind to the possibility you saw this [email] … because you know that this is evidence of your own guilty knowledge.”
Singh replied: “That is not true and I don’t feel guilty because I haven’t received it … I don’t recall receiving it, reading it or printing it – that is my evidence on oath.”
In a series of testy exchanges, Beer accused Singh of “a big fat lie”, alleging he knew about IT bugs in the Horizon IT system well before July 2013 – the date when Singh has said he first became aware of IT bugs after the investigators Second Sight identified the problems in a draft report.
Beer told him: “Do you accept your claims that the first you became aware of a bug in 2013 were false?’
Singh: “That is not true.” He later added: “I didn’t come here to lie. I am at an age where I have come here to assist the inquiry.”
Beer asked him at the start of the inquiry hearing: “Were you, Mr Singh, involved from July 2013 onwards in a cover-up of your own prior knowledge and the Post Office’s prior knowledge of the existence of bugs, errors and defects in Horizon?”
“No sir,” Singh replied.
In his witness statement, Singh said that in July 2013 he had been approached by a colleague who said his boss had told him that typed minutes of the internal weekly calls on Horizon “should be scrapped and/or shredded”. He said he “felt very uncomfortable” and insisted this must not happen, adding that it was “scary” such advice was even issued.
Singh told the inquiry he was “grieved” at what Misra had to endure and “the pain her and her family had to suffer”.
Singh joined Royal Mail as a legal executive in 1989, qualified as a lawyer in 1992, and at Royal Mail would deal with criminal prosecutions. He was the in-house criminal lawyer at the Post Office until 2015, he has said in a previous witness statement to the inquiry.
The inquiry continues.
