“That is not true and I don’t feel guilty"
An ex-Post Office lawyer has denied “covering up” knowledge of problems with the Horizon IT system.
This came after a public inquiry heard that he “sat on” an email highlighting IT bugs, which was not disclosed to the criminal trial of a pregnant post office worker.
Jarnail Singh was being questioned at the long-running public inquiry into the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office workers due to financial shortfalls in their branch accounts.
It has since emerged that these discrepancies were due to IT bugs in the Post Office’s Horizon computer system.
The inquiry heard that Singh received an email on October 8, 2010, highlighting IT problems with the Horizon system.
This was just days before the start of Seema Misra‘s trial.
Ms Misra was sentenced to 15 months in prison for theft and locked up on her son’s 10th birthday while eight weeks pregnant.
Her conviction was among those overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
The email forwarded to Singh was written by Alan Simpson, who highlighted “a series of incidents” whereby “it appears that when posting discrepancies to the local suspense [account] these amounts simply disappear at branch level”.
Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry, told Singh that the 2010 email should have “rung alarm bells” because it showed money was shown as disappearing from the Horizon IT system at the branch level.
However, the email was never disclosed to Seema Misra’s defence lawyers before her 2010 trial, which began the following week.
Jarnail Singh told the inquiry:
“I don’t remember seeing the email… [or] the attachments to it at all… From memory, I don’t recall this document.”
Mr Beer told the inquiry that the document had been saved to Singh’s computer and had been printed out minutes after it was received.
He told Singh: “What you are engaged in now is closing your mind to the possibility you saw this [email]… because you know that this is evidence of your own guilty knowledge.”
Singh replied: “That is not true and I don’t feel guilty because I haven’t received it… I don’t recall receiving it, reading it or printing it – that is my evidence on oath.”
Mr Beer accused Singh of knowing about the IT issues well before July 2013 – the date Singh claimed he first knew about the IT bugs.
Mr Beer told him:
“Do you accept your claims that the first you became aware of a bug in 2013 were false?”
The former Post Office lawyer said: “That is not true.”
He later added: “I didn’t come here to lie. I am at an age where I have come here to assist the inquiry.”
At the start of the inquiry, Mr Beer asked Singh:
“Were you, Mr Singh, involved from July 2013 onwards in a cover-up of your own prior knowledge and the Post Office’s prior knowledge of the existence of bugs, errors and defects in Horizon?”
Singh replied: “No sir.”
The inquiry continues.
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