Former Post Office general counsel Susan Crichton wanted to ‘box off’ an independent review of the Horizon system that threatened to cause shockwaves to the business, the public inquiry into the scandal has heard.
Crichton told the inquiry today that she had wanted to understand what forensic accountant Second Sight was looking into as it probed the IT system in 2013.
But inquiry counsel Julian Blake said Crichton’s email from the time about boxing off the review showed she was trying to stop wider issues being examined. Soon after, the inquiry heard, a colleague emailed Crichton saying that there was an ‘opportunity to really contain the scope of the investigation’ and advising the Post Office to ‘take advantage of this’.
Crichton was general counsel from 2010 to 2013 overseeing legal strategy and ultimately bringing in Second Sight when doubts about Horizon continued to be aired.
The inquiry heard that she faced opposition from other lawyers in the business about pausing prosecutions while the review was ongoing. In-house criminal lawyer Jarnail Singh emailed Crichton in June 2012 warning that the Post Office might lose its ability to prosecute if it is not seen to promote ‘effective, consistent and fair decision-making’.
He said that the decision not to prosecute a Dorset sub-postmistress could not be kept secret and that ‘everybody will find out what we are doing’ which would open the Post Office up to criticism and undermine faith in Horizon. Such a U-turn, he added, would be ‘exploited’ by sub-postmasters and ‘send a green light for defendants to get hold of their member of parliament and result in copulation’ (sic: Blake clarified that Singh meant to say ‘capitulation’).
But having pushed back against this, Crichton appeared from documents at the time to be reluctant to reopen previous cases. Notes of a meeting with counsel Richard Morgan KC showed that lawyers were concerned that a negative report might ‘open the floodgates’ to damages claims by people imprisoned for false accounting and theft.
On another occasion, Crichton had opposed the wish of Post Office chair Alice Perkins to include all cases raised by MPs whether or not they had resulted in a conviction. The inquiry saw an email chain in which senior staff discussed the difficulty in reopening the case involving sub-postmistress Seema Misra, who was wrongly convicted and jailed in 2010. Crichton had expressed the view that contacting Misra to say the cases was being reviewed would be a ‘red rag to a bull’.
Crichton, a solicitor, told the inquiry she was ‘too short-sighted’ and she regretted having taken this view.
Beginning her evidence, Crichton turned to the victims present and said: ‘I am truly sorry for the suffering caused to you and your families. I wish that things had been resolved more quickly and again I am very sorry that they have not been. I am here today to give my evidence to the inquiry with the view to establishing the facts and to try and ensure that something like this never happens again.’
