A former top Post Office lawyer who oversaw Alan Bates’s High Court battle against the business is refusing to co-operate with the statutory inquiry.
Jane MacLeod, who was the organisation’s general counsel from 2015 to 2019, was listed to appear next month, but her name later disappeared from the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry schedule.
The Telegraph understands she is living in New Zealand and is refusing to appear in person or by video link.
Although the inquiry has statutory powers, it cannot compel her to give evidence while she is abroad.
Ms MacLeod held the top legal role while the Post Office sought to win a High Court case against Mr Bates, former sub-postmaster, and 554 of his peers.
More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 as a result of the Horizon scandal, which saw the faulty software incorrectly record shortfalls in their accounts.
Mr Bates went on to win the case, with his campaign to expose bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system inspiring the ITV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
The revelation of Ms MacLeod’s refusal to co-operate came as Jason Beer KC, the lead counsel to the inquiry, questioned Alisdair Cameron, the organisation’s chief financial officer, on why what Ms MacLeod told the Swift review – an important 2016 report that identified several major issues with the Post Office – was not shared with him.
Mr Cameron told the inquiry he recalled that Ms MacLeod had claimed this was because of legal privilege, but then added that the inquiry would hear from her if she disagreed.
Mr Beer replied: “We’re not going to hear from her. She lives abroad and won’t co-operate.”
“Wow,” Mr Cameron said in response.
Seema Misra, a former sub-postmistress who was pregnant when she was imprisoned after being prosecuted by the Post Office, called the news “disgusting”.
Mrs Misra was eight weeks pregnant when she was handed a 15-month sentence in November 2010 after pleading guilty to false accounting and being convicted of theft by a jury.
She began running a branch in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005 but was prosecuted over an alleged shortfall of £74,000.
She said: “It’s disgusting of her not to attend and do what she can to assist the inquiry.
“It’s just arrogance and I fear it will give other witnesses ideas.”
Ms MacLeod told the BBC earlier this year that she could not comment on papers showing the Post Office knew its defence in the Bates litigation was untrue. She said at the time that she supported the ongoing public inquiry and was assisting it, but did not comment further.
On Friday, the inquiry heard that Mr Cameron believed Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive, did not believe there had been miscarriages of justice carried out by the body and “could not have got there emotionally”.
‘Original sin’
Mr Cameron, who took over as interim chief executive following Ms Vennells’s departure in March 2019, said he believed his predecessor was “unwavering” in her conviction that sub-postmasters had not been wrongfully convicted.
In a document shown to the inquiry for the first time on Friday, Mr Cameron also wrote that the Post Office’s “original sin” was its “self-absorbed and defensive” culture.
Ms Vennells, who was promoted to chief executive in 2012, resigned and left weeks before Mr Bates won his High Court victory in April 2019.
Part of Mr Cameron’s document, entitled “What went wrong?”, read: “We should have been tackling these issues 10 years ago.
“However, I do not believe that an earlier settlement was practically possible because the serious claimants believed there had been a miscarriage of justice and required recognition and an apology as much as they wanted money.
“Paula did not believe there had been a miscarriage and could not have got there emotionally.”
‘Never deviated’
When Mr Beer KC asked what gave him this perception, Mr Cameron, who has been taking time off on medical leave since April 2023, said: “Everything she said at the time.
“She seemed clear in her conviction from the day I joined that nothing had gone wrong, and it was very clearly stated in my very first board meeting. She never, in my observation, deviated from that or seemed to particularly doubt that.”
Mr Beer KC then asked: “So she was unwavering in her conviction that there had been no miscarriages of justice?”
“As far I was concerned, yeah,” Mr Cameron said.
When asked if she continued to hold this view when Mr Cameron drafted the document in 2020, he responded: “As far as I know … she’d left the business in 2019.”
A Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry spokesman said: “A fulsome update regarding Ms MacLeod’s evidence and efforts that have been made to get her to the witness stand will be provided next week.”
The Telegraph has approached Ms MacLeod for comment.
