A former Post Office investigator has maintained that a branch owner-operator who had his conviction for embezzlement overturned last year was guilty.
Raymond Grant, an investigator involved in the prosecution of the post office operator William Quarm, who died in 2012 not knowing he would eventually be cleared years later, had to be legally forced to appear to give testimony at the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal.
He told the inquiry on Wednesday he had a “clash of priorities” and wanted to focus on his current job at the Salvation Army.
Grant, a programme manager at the charity who works with homeless people, said he had been too busy with activities such as carol singing, making Christmas dinners and walking his dog over the festive period when the inquiry expected him to write up his witness statement.
“I chose my current job as being most important as it directly affected 20 members of staff and 29 homeless residents,” he told the hearing. “I fully understand my obligations to this important inquiry, but my time was limited.”
Grant said he had received 78 documents totalling 450 pages to read. He said this was an “inordinate amount” he only “glanced” at, and that he was given just 26 days to write up his witness statement. The statement filed to the inquiry was just over two pages long.
Representatives of the inquiry chased Grant, who described them on Wednesday as having “different priorities to mine”, and eventually sheriff officers visited his house to deliver a section 21 notice forcing him to comply and appear at the inquiry.
“That kind of focused me,” he told the hearing. “I drafted the minimum statement to comply with the section 21 order. I apologise to court [but] I do not think it was a fair thing to ask me to do in such a short space of time considering this inquiry was going on for months and years.”
Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, asked Grant whether he believed Quarm, a father of five, was guilty even though his conviction was overturned by the Scottish high court last year. “Yes, I do,” Grant said. “I still think Mr Quarm had a role to play in the loss of the money.”
Quarm, who was 66 when the case was brought against him and described as a “man of good character”, was prosecuted for embezzling funds through the Post Office branch he ran to support his loss-making grocery store on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
Grant moved off the case into a role he described as “gardening leave” before a decision was made by the Post Office to move to trial. He said in a report following a 44-minute interview with Quarm that he had made “full and frank admissions” about using the Horizon system as part of engineering personal bank transactions and loans to support his other business.
However, evidence was shown to the inquiry that the subsequent decision to prosecute was made without Scottish cases being run through the Post Office’s central legal services team that advise on “sufficiency of evidence”.
“My understanding is that there was no lawyer employed in criminal law …. qualified to make the decision because there was no one trained in Scots law,” said Grant. “They took a hands-off approach.”
For the trial, the Post Office also did not follow the usual practice of obtaining transaction data through its team that handled Audit Request Queries, and there was no witness statement submitted from Fujitsu vouching for the robustness of the Horizon IT system.
In 2010, Quarm, who collapsed during one interview with the Post Office, pleaded guilty to embezzling money to avoid going to prison and was given a community order sentence. He died in 2012.
“The Post Office let the postmasters down,” said Grant, giving a final personal statement to the inquiry. “They let the staff who they employed down by being less than open and honest with information that should have been shared and wasn’t shared. They deceived me and deceived an awful lot more people. For my part in it, I am humbly sorry.”
The inquiry into the scandal, which is being chaired by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, began last year and has gained greater public attention since the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office was broadcast this month.
Faults in the Horizon IT system, which was built by the Japanese tech firm Fujitsu, resulted in the Post Office wrongfully pursuing and prosecuting hundreds of post office operators for theft, fraud and false accounting in what has been called the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history.
On Wednesday, Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for postal services, said Fujitsu should pay “hundreds of millions of pounds” in compensation for its role in the Post Office scandal.
