12.55pm: More discussion about Altman’s advice to impose a January 2010 cut-off date for reviewing cases. Conference meeting notes show Post Office lawyers discussed whether Altman was working under the ‘incorrect assumption’ that there were no bugs before that date. He says he was not told such discussions took place.
Beer asks Altman whether he stands by the advice that anyone convicted before 2010 should have to come forward to join the mediation scheme or raise concerns.
He says he does, adding: ‘The law has never been on past convictions that a prosecutor has to go out and search for cases which may be unsafe on the basis of little or no information.’
12.50pm: The conference notes record that lawyers discussed whether they should apologize to Misra ahead of the mediation scheme.
Altman was recorded as saying: ‘I wouldn’t’. He defends this stance now, saying that Misra had accused guilty in 2009 to false accounting and he ‘couldn’t understand’ why the Post Office was going to apologize when she had admitted to a crime. He says it was for the Court of Appeal to disturb the conviction, not the mediation scheme.
12.40pm: A conference note from September 2013 shows lawyers including Brian Altman discussing a potential ‘cut off date’ that would prevent a review of cases going back beyond a certain point. The date of January 2010 was proposed, which would mean that Seema Misra’s case would be included.
The notes show that Altman was content with this date, but they could not ‘avoid the possibility Misra’s may crawl out of woodwork’, the notes record. Altman now says there is no reason to believe this was not an accurate record of what he said. He denies Beer’s suggestion that the cut-off date was a way of stopping the floodgates from opening on more potential appeals from sub-postmasters.
12.20pm: Beer asks whether Bond Dickinson was suggesting that Altman should not think about broadening the scope of the ongoing reviews of Horizon. ‘It appears to be so,’ he replies.
He is then asked whether this suggests a ‘lurking difficulty’ that issues with how criminal cases had been handled were causing concerns for the Post Office’s civil lawyers.
Altman says he cannot remember anybody warning him that he should avoid saying anything which might impact civil liability. If they had, he tells the inquiry, he would have stressed that he could not be guided by potential liability. He is adamant that he never met with Bond Dickinson to discuss this.
12.10pm: We move on to a section of Altman’s draft advice (see par 12 below) where he said there were other questions that should be considered in ongoing reviews. This would suggest that Post Office should be taking a much wider look at what was going on and leave the Post Office facing bigger questions.
Beer introduces the idea that at this stage civil litigation lawyers – concerned about the prospect of sub-postmasters making claims perhaps – were increasingly involved in these discussions. One email from Bond Dickinson’s Gavin Matthews in response to Altman’s draft suggested that the firm could ‘sit down with Brian Altman to walk him through the [ongoing reviews] so that he can understand the impact of his review on the civil side’.
Altman says this conversation never happened.
12pm: Beer really pushing at this issue of why Altman (and Clarke) had concluded Jenkins was so unreliable. The inquiry counsel asks whether Altman ever considered telling the DPP, the attorney general (a pointed question, perhaps, given that the Post Office had speculated in 2013 whether Altman had the ear of both) or even the police. Altman says he didn’t. Beer then asks whether this failure to Disclose meant that information was not known about Jenkins until the Horizon Issues trial in 2019. Altman says it was available to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2015 so he was not responsible for the truth not getting out so late .
11.50am: Altman says that the two possible criminal charges would be perverting the course of justice and perjury. But again he says he is not prepared to speculate on whether Jenkins was either dishonest or incompetent.
11.40am: Altman appears on the back foot on the issue of why Clarke’s advice on Jenkins was not disclosed. He says he did not apply his mind to the issue but that it ‘slipped through’ as the focus was on the new bugs that had been discovered. ‘It is hard to look back and thing “how on earth did I miss that?” he adds.
Beer asks whether Jenkins committed a criminal offense in his provision of evidence to the court. Altman says he does not want to speculate on that.
11.35am: A reminder of the Clarke Advice on Jenkins, below. Altman says he agreed with Clarke but that the advice was never disclosed.
11.30am: Back from the break and Beer returns to the issue of Jenkins’ part in prosecutions.
Altman’s review stated that Jenkins was ‘tainted and his position as an expert witness is untenable’. He accepts this was based on the Clarke Advice rather than anything he uncovered.
Was anything done, Beer asks, to then inform past and ongoing defendants facing prosecution about this position?
Altman responds: ‘I know what you are driving at Mr Beer and it is something in recent weeks which I have thought about and is something that should have been disclosed to appropriate people.’
Beer repeats his question whether defendants should have been told that Jenkins wrongly withheld knowledge about Horizon bugs.
Altman responds: ‘Unhappily that has to be the case. With the benefit of hindsight and having thought an awful lot about this it is something that should have been considered for disclosure.’
He accepts he should have done more to ensure this information was disclosed to the relevant people.
11.15am: The inquiry sees evidence that lawyers and senior stakeholders were discussing the existence of Horizon bugs in June 2013. None of this was disclosed to Altman despite him reviewing prosecutions at around this time. We then go to a break.
11am: Altman says he was never made aware at the time that there were serious questions in Cartwright King and the Post Office in-house team about Gareth Jenkins’ role. He wasn’t told that bugs were known about before Seema Misra’s trial in 2010.
He accepts his approach might have been different if he knew about these things and he would have asked to speak to Jenkins.
10.55am: In Altman’s witness statement, which can be seen here, the KC says that ‘why Mr Jenkins had failed to reveal in his witness statements or evidence the bugs or defects he knew about was not a matter for my review. However, it was the impact of those failures on his future role as an expert and more importantly the effect of those failures of disclosure on past convictions and current prosecutions that were the focus of attention’.
Beer puts to him that Jenkins’ role was not examined by Altman because he himself cut this out of the terms of reference. Altman says Jenkins was not relevant to his instructions.
10.50am: The inquiry sees the draft terms of reference prepared for Altman by Bond Dickinson before he wrote that Jenkins’ role should not be considered by him.
This draft states very clearly that Altman should advise Post Office on the role of Jenkins and the impact on possible appeals. The final terms of reference took out any reference to the role of Jenkins. Altman tells the inquiry he saw his remit as looking into the impact of criminal prosecutions and not investigating what had happened in the past.
10.40am: Beer hones in on Altman’s instructions which he himself set out in 2013, and in particular what Altman did about meeting key expert witness Gareth Jenkins.
Jenkins had produced reports in several cases and given live evidence in the trial of Seema Misra in 2010. But his credibility was seriously in question after the advice from Cartwright King’s Simon Clarke in July 2013 which said the expert had known about bugs in the Horizon system but not disclosed this.
A month later, Altman set out his own remit in reviewing prosecutorial policy. He stated that there were risks to not meeting Jenkins but concluded that ‘for now it may be better for the terms of reference to stay silent about him’. Beer, who is showing no signs of reverence to a fellow KC, asks whether Altman was here ‘turning a blind eye’ to potential useful sources of information.
Altman responds: ‘I was not turning a blind eye to anything’.
10.30am: The inquiry is now taken back to 2013 and an email from Bond Dickinson solicitor Andrew Parson ahead of Altman’s appointment, saying the KC was ‘very live to the political dimension’. Altman tells the inquiry that everyone was aware at this stage about the political dimension of this issue, as the Post Office was a government-owned organization and the ‘balloon was going up’ in respect of past convictions.
10.25am: A reminder of Altman’s advice to Post Office, which was to be used in all responses to the media: ‘I have seen no evidence to suggest that Post Office Ltd exercises its investigations and prosecution function in anything other than a well-organized, structured and efficient manner, through an expert and dedicated team of in-house investigators and lawyers, supported by Cartwright King and their in-house counsel’.
It is fair to say that this position is now largely discredited, given the conclusions of Mr Justice Fraser in the civil litigation.
10.20am: While Altman denies he used his influence or connections, Beer is pursuing the line that the Post Office did. We see an internal email from solicitor Rodric Williams ahead of the BBC’s One Show broadcasting an investigative piece on the Horizon scandal. The email includes in bold the question put to the Post Office and Williams’ response, in which he says that Altman may be name checked and that this option was contemplated when he was instructed.
10.10am: The inquiry sees emails exchanged by Post Office lawyers prior to Altman’s instruction, discussing the merits of various candidates. In one, Gavin Matthews, a solicitor with Bond Dickinson, noted that there is a ‘possible attraction politically’ of having a former First Treasury Counsel and later suggested Altman ‘has the ear’ of the director of public prosecutions and attorney general’s office. In-house Post Office lawyer Hugh Flemington said these connections ‘sound useful’.
Altman says these thoughts were never communicated to him and he never used any connections he had made through his past role, neither was he asked to. He concedes that Post Office might have seen ‘political leverage’ in appointing him but they would be ‘totally wrong’ to do so.
10am: Altman is being asked today by leading inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC. So two legal heavyweights facing each other. Beer goes over Altman’s background as First Senior Treasury Counsel – his role immediately before advising the Post Office – and asks whether he was conscious that the Post Office wanted to tap into that storied past.
Altman says: ‘I wasn’t conscious of it. I suppose I would say it didn’t surprise me that they came to somebody with that history… no-one ever said to me “we are instructing you because of your professional history”.’
