A former top Post Office executive has claimed issues raised by colleagues relating to the Horizon IT system were “outside my knowledge scope”.
Angela van den Bogerd also told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry in central London that maintaining strong public relations was “very important” to the company.
On her second day of giving evidence at the inquiry on Friday, Ms van den Bogerd was asked about the cases of several individual subpostmasters and their branches.
The inquiry was shown an email from fraud analyst Helen Rose sent to Ms van den Bogerd on February 13 2013 about the audit record query (ARQ) logs being provided by Fujitsu for use in court.
Ms Rose expressed concerns that in some cases the logs “would not be giving a true picture” in court, and later said: “I don’t know where to go with this.”
Asked by Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, if Ms Rose was raising a broader issue about IT systems, Ms van den Bogerd said: “That’s not how I read this.”
Ms van den Bogerd confirmed she did not do anything with the contents of the emails and that she expected Ms Rose to raise the issue “through her reporting line”.
Mr Beer asked: “That didn’t ring any alarm bells?”
She replied: “Not for me at the time.”
Mr Beer continued: “Is it one of those things that it’s just somebody else’s job, Ms van den Bogerd?”
She said: “Well it was outside my knowledge scope, so I wouldn’t have had the knowledge to know what to do with that.”
She added: “Now, I would obviously look at this very, very differently.”
The inquiry was also shown a series of letters and emails concerning the case of Martin Griffiths, who was sacked from his Hope Farm Post Office branch in Cheshire in July 2013.
Mr Griffiths deliberately stepped in front of an oncoming bus on September 23 2013, after he had been deemed culpable for an armed robbery at his branch in May of that year.
He had also previously written to the Post Office in July 2013 about a £39,000 shortfall at his branch between February 2012 and May 2013.
An email shared by Alan Bates to Post Office executives from Mr Griffiths’ mother on the same day said “the post office had driven him to suicide”.
The email was eventually forwarded to Ms van den Bogerd with suggestions to hire a specialist media lawyer.
Mr Beer asked: “The immediate reaction was not what can we the Post Office do to help this man’s family, was it?”
Ms van ven Bogerd replied: “Not at this point.”
Mr Beer continued: “Is that what it was like working in the Post Office at this time? That the first thought was, we need a media lawyer?”
She replied: “In all my time with Post Office from very, very early on, I was very conscious that PR was very important.”
The inquiry was later shown emails from forensic accountant Ron Warmington and Shirley Hailstones, a Post Office case review manager, sent in November 2013, discussing potential links between faults at different Post Office branches.
Ms Hailstones did not copy in former subpostmasters Lee Castleton and Alan Bates to her email, before she shared it with Ms van den Bogerd and said: “This interaction in my view should not be widely circulated.”
Asked about the absence, Ms van den Bogerd said she had heard subpostmasters did not want direct contact from the Post Office as it “just brought back bad memories”.
Put to her by Mr Beer that the Post Office wanted to “erect information barriers”, she replied: “No.”
Ms van den Bogerd held various roles throughout her 35-year career at the Post Office, starting off as a network change operations manager, then on to head of network services, head of partnerships, director of support services and the director of people and change.
She was appointed as the Post Office’s business improvement director in 2018, but stepped down from the role in 2020.
Ms van den Bogerd was played by Coronation Street actress Katherine Kelly in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which aired in January.
Errors in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system meant money appeared to be missing from many branch accounts when, in fact, it was not.
As a result, the government-owned organisation prosecuted more than 700 subpostmasters who were handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015.
The scandal represents one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK legal history. Since then, the Court of Appeal has quashed the convictions of more than 100 subpostmasters.
Hundreds of subpostmasters are still awaiting compensation despite the Government announcing that those whose convictions have been quashed are eligible for £600,000 payouts.
Ms van den Bogerd was made redundant by the Post Office, according to her witness statement.