The Post Office has been accused of withholding thousands of documents from the inquiry into an IT scandal that led to more 700 unsafe convictions.
The Post Office IT inquiry resumed on Tuesday with a strongly worded row over the failure to disclosure more than 30,000 documents. Lawyers for the unfairly convicted operators accused the Post Office of continuing to deploy “malevolent” tactics to frustrate justice.
They also called for the inquiry to be adjourned until all the relevant documents were made available.
A lawyer for the Post Office strenuously denied the claims. The dispute provided a foretaste for what is set to be a hotly contested second phase of the inquiry into one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
Edward Henry KC, representing one group of post office operators, suggested the Post Office needed to be trained to comply with disclosure orders.
He said: “I’m afraid I can’t use the analogy of a puppy because of course the Post Office are far more sinister and I regret to submit malevolent animal, but you have to train an unruly participant.”
Henry said the Post Office had continued to show “contempt for the process”, adding: “It has demonstrated time and time again that it cannot be relied upon or trusted to comply with court orders.”
He said the Post Office was “an institution which seems incapable of acting fairly towards those it has maimed and marred”.
He added: “To the core participants we represent, the Post Office exercised almost total power over them. It treated them contemptuously it subverted the rule of law to suit its own agenda. It twisted, distorted and overrode vital processes in both civil and criminal courts, depriving the core participants of vital rights which meant that the law could not protect them.”
Henry also accused the Post Office of having a vendetta against his clients. “It did flatten people who sought to challenge their narrative,” he told the inquiry.
Sam Stein KC, speaking for 153 victims of the scandal, said: “To go ahead now is to allow the Post Office to dictate the pace and content of disclosure. That’s what they’ve been doing for 20 years, and this we submit is what they’re trying to do now.”
Addressing the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, the chairman of the inquiry, Kate Gallafent KC, for the Post Office said: “We emphatically refute any suggestion that we have intended to obfuscate attempts by you sir and your team to obtain these documents.”
She said the some of the documents had proven “harder than anticipated to review” because of a problem with a software programme while others were inadequately indexed.
She said: “There was certainly no intention to delay their disclosure. There was equally no intention to obfuscate attempts by the inquiry to obtain those documents.”
Williams decided against adjourning the inquiry, blaming the disclosure problem on a “glitch”.
He said: “It is obviously regrettable that disclosure of documents potentially relevant to phase two is not yet complete.” And he warned the Post Office: “I will use all the extensive powers at my disposal to obtain the documents which have not been disclosed. Everyone should understand, that proper disclosure is crucial to the success of this inquiry.”
The IT system installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu falsely suggested there were cash shortfalls, leading to 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting.
The inquiry continues.
