Post Office president Nick Read has actually claimed he was informed not to “dig into the details of the past” by its leading attorney when entering the function in 2019.
Giving proof at the long-running Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, he claimed he was not alerted of the “scale and enormity” of the Horizon IT detraction prior to taking the leading work.
Mr Read signed up with long after the occasions which stimulated the Horizon detraction, where greater than 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted for taking, based upon wrong details from an IT system referred to as Horizon.
But when he ended up being president in 2019, lawsuits in between a team of 555 subpostmasters and the Post Office was simply capping, in which the firm consented to pay ₤ 58 million in payment.
Mr Read claimed in a witness declaration reviewed at the query: “Private prosecutions were presented to me as a historic issue that had ceased before 2015 and that I did not need to dig into the details of what had happened at Post Office in the past as this conduct had ended.”
He validated that it was the Post Office’s basic advice Ben Foat, that is briefly far from business, that had actually informed him that.
Furthermore, Mr Read informed the query that he was oriented by elderly participants of the organisation before entering the function.
He claimed: “Amongst those briefings, I don’t think the scale or enormity of the scandal was brought to life for me because I don’t think there was a realisation or recognition at that stage on what was needed to be done or what was likely to happen.”
He included that there was a “degree of denial” over the influence of the Post Office shedding the lawsuits brought by the subpostmasters, which he claimed in his witness declaration had actually brought “shock and surprise” to the management group.
He composed: “My recollection is that it was only in 2020 when there seemed to be a groundswell of opinion that Post Office had serious questions to answer about its previous mistreatment of postmasters that the senior leadership and board started to understand the potential scale of the crisis.”
Furthermore, Mr Read clarified the point of view of the organisation after the sentences of thousands of postmasters were suppressed previously this year.
“I don’t think I could say specifically that that is the case but there will be a view that not every quashed conviction will be innocent postmasters,” he informed the query.
“The majority of the organisation would agree that the action that has been taken is absolutely the right action and whether there are guilty postmasters that have been exonerated really is no longer an issue.”
The employer, that just recently revealed that he would certainly be tipping down as president following year, claimed he felt it was “astonishing” that the Post Office itself was associated with carrying out payment for wrongly-prosecuted postmasters.
“My personal view and one that I have expressed consistently … was that it seems astonishing to me that an organisation that has been involved in the prosecution of postmasters should be involved in redress,” he claimed.
Meanwhile, more information arised in Mr Read’s witness declaration of the elimination of previous chairman Henry Staunton from his message by the after that company assistant, Kemi Badenoch, at the beginning of the year.
Mr Read claimed there were a “wider set of issues relating to Henry’s behaviour and capacity as chair” which he thought added to the Government determining that “change was needed”.
This consisted of “unprofessional behaviour, such as falling asleep in board and shareholder meetings” because of him being “fatigued” and “not close enough to the issues on redress and the evidence emerging from the inquiry”.
“He would frequently report surprise at the amount of time he had to dedicate to the role, and the impression given was that he had signed up for a different job to the one he found himself in,” Mr Read composed.
Mr Staunton formerly asserted that Mr Read displayed practices which made up “bullying”, insurance claims which Mr Read shot down.
