10.30am: Slightly more scattergun approach this morning. Blake moves onto remote access and the transcript of a meeting Crichton had with Second Sight and the Post Office company secretary in which it was raised that Horizon operator Fujitsu could access branch accounts without sub-postmasters knowing about it. An email is shown to the inquiry that shows Crichton was told in Jun 2013 that remote access may be possible. She states that she obviously received the email but her attention wwas not drawn to it.
10.15am: Crichton is taken to the issue of her not being routinely invited into boardroom meetings. She says this was a very different approach to in-house lawyers compared to US companies that she had worked with before.
Crichton is asked whether she flagged up with the board when she received advice that expert witness Gareth Jenkins’ evidence may have been flawed, and when she received advice that there may have been shredding of key documents to prevent them being disclosed.
Chair Sir Wyn Williams presses Crichton not on whether she could have flagged up these issues to the board but whether she should have. She concedes that she should have set up a process to ensure the board was told.
10am: Blake begins by asking specifically about in-house criminal lawyers Rob Wilson and Jarnail Singh. Crichton declines to speak about their competence but says there was an issue with ‘attitude’, and in particular their ‘unhealthy view’ of sub-postmasters. Crichton says their approach was that this was public money and they had to protect it.
She adds that Singh and Wilson told her that there had been no prosecutions based on Horizon evidence which had failed. This turned out not to be true. Crichton said she trusted their word because they were lawyers and ‘must have known what they were talking about’.
9.50am: So what did we learn from yesterday’s appearance from Crichton?
She appears to have been trapped between evidence emerging that Horizon convictions were unreliable and her role in the Post Office, where she was expected to promote the interests of the business.
She was shut out of a board meeting where she was due to present a paper on the Second Sight review of Horizon. The Post Office chair found it ‘astonishing’ that Crichton wanted to keep her distance from the Second Sight team and chief executive Paula Vennells complained that Crichton prioritised her integrity as a lawyer.
But there was also evidence that Crichton sought to place limits on the scope of the Second Sight review and little sign of her responding when it seemed that figures in the Post Office advised that key documents be shredded.
But first, some unfinished business from yesterday. Inquiry counsel Julian Blake had not finished questioning Aujard’s predecessor Susan Crichton so she returns this morning.
