“The evil the Post Office did was profound”, a lawyer has told the Horizon IT scandal inquiry while describing a “deliberate conspiracy” and “cover up”.
Edward Henry KC, who is representing victims, delivered his closing submission to the hearings with a powerful and damning monologue.
He accused the Post Office of “profound evil”, adding that it “was the cause, the perpetrator and prolonger of the one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in our history.”
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully convicted of offences including theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015.
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Faulty Horizon computer software, provided by Fujitsu, caused erroneous shortfalls in accounts, but Mr Henry asserted that “Horizon didn’t destroy the innocent – the malignant culture of the Post Office did.”
He described it as having “contempt” for sub-postmasters and spoke of “corrosive prejudice” against victims alongside its “desire for absolute control over them”, saying that was the “incubator for these terrible events.”
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Mr Henry told Sir Wyn Williams, the chair of the inquiry, that the Post Office’s “words of apology are bogus”, that “it cannot be trusted” and that “deplorable wrongdoing went to the top.
“The truth is that human beings engaged in a deliberate conspiracy,” he further claimed, “first to convict innocent people either in criminal courts or to destroy them in the civil courts – and then to cover it up.”
Mr Henry said that sub-postmasters were “stigmatised as troublemakers, incompetent or dishonest” and their cries of help were “dismissed”.
“Such heartlessness came from the top”, he continued.
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“Whether the board and the executive knew of these injustices from the start is an irrelevant diversion.
“They ought to have known or appreciated that by refusing to countenance the possibility that Horizon might generate shortfall errors, they had created a terrible risk.
“It was a recipe for certain disaster.”
Among others he singled out former Post Office boss Paula Vennells, stating that she had written in 2014 that “she was more bored than outraged by the sub-postmasters’ complaints”.
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He made his remarks as her own final submission to the inquiry stated there was “nothing to show she acted in bad faith”.
Mr Henry said there was a culture of “contempt, ridicule and hatred” towards victims.
He also asked the question: “is the Post Office worth saving?” and then answered: “Only when and if it is safe.”
He stated that it would only be safe once it could “understand the nature of its own history rather than continuing to deny it,” adding “it can only be trusted when its deeds match its words and when it has restored justice by way of full and fair compensation to those it destroyed.”
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Former sub-postmaster Chris Head described the morning’s submission as “extremely powerful testimony” and also reflected on delays to financial redress schemes for victims.
“(Edward Henry’s words) cut through all the PR strategy used by both the Post Office and their shareholder, the government, to portray that they have changed and are doing everything possible to right the wrongs,” he said, “whilst at the same time behind closed doors continuing down the same path of delay, deflect and inflict harm on those affected.”
“They advance every possible legal argument regardless of merit to limit liability likely pushed and encouraged by the Department for Business and Trade and Her Majesty’s Treasury.”
The inquiry continues.
