Met Police investigating senior Post Office worker over evidence destruction allegation

The Metropolitan Police has taken over the investigation into allegations that a Post Office worker advised staff to destroy or conceal evidence of potential interest to the Post Office scandal public inquiry, according to the latest witness.

Previously, the Met Police and the Post Office would not comment on whether the investigation had become a police matter.

As Computer Weekly first reported earlier this month, in her witness statement, the Post Office’s current company secretary Rachel Scarrabelotti, wrote of “allegations that a senior Post Office member of staff had instructed their team to destroy or conceal material of possible interest to the inquiry, and that the same individual had engaged in inappropriate behaviour”.

When approached by Computer Weekly at the time, the Metropolitan Police said: “We can’t comment on specific individuals, but the Met is a Core Participant in the public inquiry and is monitoring and assessing material as it is received, along with other additional lines of investigation.”

But evidence in the latest public inquiry hearing has confirmed the Met Police is now investigating an individual. During his evidence session, John Bartlett, director of assurance and complex investigations at the Post Office, confirmed that the Metropolitan Police was now investigating: “We told the inquiry about it, we told the Met Police about it and it is now a Met Police investigation.”

When asked, Bartlett confirmed that the person under investigation, who is currently suspended, is not involved in giving evidence in the current phase – Phase 7 – of the public inquiry.

The shocking revelation echoes evidence from appeals against wrongful convictions in 2021. During the Court of Appeal trials, it was revealed that a senior Post Office executive instructed employees to shred documents that undermined an insistence that its Horizon computer system was robust, amid claims that errors in the system caused unexplained accounting shortfalls.

During the Court of Appeal hearing, lawyers representing former subpostmasters appealing to have wrongful prosecutions quashed referred to advice given to the Post Office in 2013 by Simon Clarke, a barrister advising the Post Office at the time.

In a note to the Post Office, written in 2013, referring to a conference set up to act as “the primary repository for all Horizon-related issues”, Clarke wrote: “The minutes of a previous conference call had been typed and emailed to a number of persons. An instruction was then given that those emails and minutes should be, and have been, destroyed: the word ‘shredded’ was conveyed to me.”

Criminal Psychologist Ian Ross, a former police officer and listed expert for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, said destroying evidence of any kind needs to explained.

Criticising police inaction in relation to the scandal, he said: “In some instances in the Post Office scandal, the police should have taken action and charged certain individuals with certain offences already.”   

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).

• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •

• Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •

• Also read: Post Office and Fujitsu malevolence and incompetence means huge taxpayers’ bill •