FORMER Post Office chair Tim Parker has denied intentionally hiding a critical report he commissioned on the Horizon IT system from the board.
In 2016, Jonathan Swift, a former senior Treasury lawyer, authored a report highlighting concerns about the Horizon accounting software, which was later discovered to be defective.
Faulty data from Horizon led to the wrongful convictions of 700 sub-postmasters for theft and fraud between 1999 and 2015.
During an inquiry last week, it was revealed that only four copies of the Swift report were produced, none of which were shared with the Post Office board or the government, the BBC reported.
Parker revealed he followed advice from Post Office lawyers to keep the document confidential.
"It's one of my regrets that I got this advice and I took it," Parker said. "Could we have shared it? I wish we had, in a way. I had this report commissioned to get some result from it, but then I received this advice."
The convictions of all sub-postmasters have since been overturned, but many individuals suffered imprisonment or lost their businesses.
The Swift report was commissioned by the government following a BBC Panorama programme in 2015 that questioned the validity of the evidence against those convicted.
The report, while supportive of the Post Office in some aspects, raised significant concerns about the sufficiency of evidence for theft charges and the integrity of Horizon data, which was later found to be alterable remotely by Fujitsu, the software developer.
Parker, who served as chair from October 2015 to September 2022, explained that top Post Office lawyer Jane MacLeod advised him against sharing the report due to its legal privilege, equating it to confidential communications between a lawyer and client.
He was informed that breaching this confidentiality could result in the report becoming public and thus it had to be confined within the Post Office legal team.
When questioned by inquiry lead counsel Jason Beer, Parker admitted that his actions prevented the board from discussing the report's findings but denied any improper motives.
"What possible motive would I have had at the time from hiding this report from my fellow board members, other than receiving advice that I shouldn't share it? I had no vested interest in trying to protect the Post Office," he was quoted as saying.
Parker conceded that, in hindsight, the advice he received might not have been entirely fair or right. However, he believed at the time that the advice was given in good faith and that it was the right thing to do.
During further questioning, lawyer Sam Stein criticised Parker for being a "part-time" chair with "part-baked" decisions. Initially, Parker dedicated one-and-a-half days per week to his Post Office duties, later reducing this to half-a-day per week.
Parker, however, denied it, saying that he provided sufficient time and attention to his responsibilities.
Following the Swift review, auditors Deloitte were hired in February 2016 to investigate Horizon transactions dating back to 1999. This investigation was abandoned in June 2016 when sub-postmasters, led by campaigner Sir Alan Bates, initiated legal action against the Post Office.
Parker agreed that, had the report not been kept secret, the Post Office might have approached the High Court action differently, which ultimately cost more than £100 million.
However, he also noted that resolving all the issues might have required judicial intervention by that stage.
Apsana Begum
