A senior Post Office employee admitted deleting crucial information from a witness statement later used to prosecute a postmaster – but denied there was a cover-up.
Graham Ward, a former security team casework manager and financial investigator, conceded he had removed reference to bugs in the system expert from witness Gareth Jenkins’ testimony when the Post Office sought to prosecute postmaster Noel Thomas in 2006 over an alleged £48,000 debt.
Mr Thomas, from Anglesey in north Wales, was handed a nine-year jail term after pleading guilty to false accounting, something he said he did in order to escape a more serious charge of theft.
His conviction was later overturned.
At the inquiry into the scandal, Post Office worker Mr Ward today [thurs] said he made changes to the witness statement, telling colleagues in an internal email at the time that admitting errors in the accounting software, known as Horizon, would undermine the Post Office’s case and leave it open to being ’embarrassed at court’.
Mr Ward, who was warned by inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams about potentially incriminating himself at the inquiry in central London, denied his actions were part of a wider cover-up to protect the Post Office, and said: ‘I can see how it looks, and I’m sorry it looks that way. But I can assure you that was not my intention.’
Mr Ward was previously called to give evidence in February, during which he said he ‘would not have written over or deleted anything from anybody’s statement’.
But he was recalled yesterday after Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, said new material had emerged of Mr Ward’s potential involvement.
The inquiry heard Mr Jenkins, an expert at tech giants Fujitsu who made the faulty software for the Post Office, produced a draft statement to be used in court against wrongly accused postmaster Mr Thomas, which noted: ‘There had been some sort of system failure (with Horizon). Such failures are normal occurrence.’
Mr Ward wrote to a colleague: ‘This statement needs more work.’
He added the reference to the ‘system failure’ was ‘potentially very damaging’.
He wrote: ‘It is more important to get it right and ensure we are not embarrassed at court, which we certainly could be if we produced a statement accepting ‘system failures are normal occurrences’.’
Mr Beer said the statement was written in a Word document, which identified Mr Ward spent 52 minutes making changes.
Among the amendments was to strike through the reference to the ‘system failure’.
An annotation, made by Mr Ward on the document, added: ‘This is a really poor choice of words which seems to accept that failures in the system are normal and therefore may well support the postmasters claim that the system is to blame for the losses!!!!’
Mr Beer asked: ‘You agree you deleted those words?’
Mr Ward replied: ‘I put a line through it, yes I can see. And it’s deleted. I was just trying to help him and to review a statement.’
He denied Mr Beer’s suggestion that the reference needed to be deleted so as not to support Mr Thomas’ defence.
Mr Ward said: ‘My intention was not for anything to be deleted but I can see that, yes, that’s how it looks.’
Mr Beer asked: ‘Do you agree that the information that you deleted was material to the prosecution of Mr Jenkins?’
Mr Ward replied: ‘Yes’
But he said he did not agree that his conduct directly caused material information to be removed from the witness statement in the prosecution against Mr Thomas.
Mr Ward, appearing via video-link, said: ‘I don’t, I think the decision to remove that had to have been Mr Jenkins’ decision. What went in there, that was for Mr Jenkins to decide.’
He said integrity of the Horizon software ‘wasn’t an issue for us at all’ in 2006.
Mr Beer said: ‘This was a rather sloppy attempt at covering up in criminal proceedings evidence of system faults with Horizon.’
Mr Ward replied: ‘Absolutely not, I wouldn’t agree there, I’m not trying to cover anything up at all.
‘There is no motive from me to remove anything because at the time there was absolutely in my head no issues with Horizon at all.
‘The idea I would be covering anything up just would not have been in my head at all.’
More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as the faulty IT system it used made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
Mr Thomas previously described his ‘nightmare’ at being handed a jail term.
He said: ‘I found myself at Walton prison in Liverpool. It was horrible as I knew I had never done anything wrong’, he said. ‘I felt terrible for my family as I was stuck in prison and they had to face people. Mud sticks.
‘What got me through was my family and friends, and we got a lot of support from our local community.
‘But we did have experiences of people crossing the street to avoid me.’
The inquiry continues.