By Tom Espiner
Business reporter, BBC News
Former sub-postmaster and campaigner Alan Bates has said the Post Office was being run by “little more than thugs in suits” in 2010.
In a strongly worded witness statement to the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, he accused the Post Office of lying about the accounting system.
He also said the organisation had spent 23 years trying to “discredit and silence” him.
The Post Office apologised for hurt caused by the scandal.
It also said it regretted not disclosing documents to the inquiry “as early as all parties would have liked”.
Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office due to the faulty Horizon software, which showed errors that did not exist.
Some lost their jobs, businesses and homes. Many were left financially ruined. Others were convicted and sent to prison and some died while waiting for justice.
Mr Bates has been campaigning on behalf of sub-postmasters for decades and was recently catapulted into the national spotlight by an ITV drama about the scandal, Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
On Tuesday, the public inquiry resumed and Mr Bates was the first person to provide evidence ahead of more key witnesses appearing over the next 15 weeks.
In response to a letter from former postal affairs minister Sir Ed Davey in 2010, Mr Bates wrote back: “It’s not that you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter, after all you do own 100% of the shares and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.
“It is because you have adopted an arm’s length relationship that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset stripped by little more than thugs in suits, and you have enabled them to carry on with impunity regardless of the human misery and suffering they inflict.”
The BBC has contacted the Liberal Democrats for comment.
‘Campaign to expose truth’
In Mr Bates’s witness statement on Tuesday, the former sub-postmaster said he had “spent the last 23 years campaigning to expose the truth, and justice”.
He also told the inquiry that before he was sacked he had repeatedly raised concerns about Horizon, including in a letter he had sent in December 2000, two months after the system had been installed in his post office branch in Craig-y-Don in Llandudno.
When Horizon was first installed he had been “quite positive” about it, having had experience with retailing and accounting software since 1986.
However, he soon found “frustrating” problems with it, including a lack of transparency over transaction data.
He refused to accept that shortfalls in his accounts were his responsibility to make good, maintaining that it was the software that was faulty.
When his employment was terminated in November 2003, he was “annoyed” with that “to put it mildly”.
But he added that his sacking was “partly expected, in a way, because it was pretty obvious [the Post Office] were after me one way or another” after he repeatedly raised concerns about Horizon.
The inquiry was shown slides from an undated presentation prepared by Dave Smith, a former Post Office manager, which said Mr Bates “had discrepancies” but was “dismissed because he became unmanageable”.
“Clearly struggled with accounting, and despite copious support, did not follow instructions,” the presentation said.
When asked by lead counsel to the inquiry Jason Beer KC if it was ever explained to him that he became “unmanageable”, he smiled and said: “No, not at all.”
He also denied having ever struggled with accounting, or being given “copious” support.
Over more than two years he and his staff made 507 calls to the Post Office helpline, 85 of which related to Horizon.
He said the helpline was not much help. “Stating the bleeding obvious is one description I might use. It was all things that I’d tried.”
In a surprise appearance on Wednesday, Post Office chief executive Nick Read was present in the inquiry room.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Read admitted financial redress for sub-postmasters had been “slow”.
While he did not want to go into the specifics of Mr Bates’s case and why his claim had not yet been settled, he said he wanted to “demonstrate [his] support” for sub-postmasters and for Mr Bates.
A Post Office spokesperson said: “Post Office is deeply sorry for the hurt and suffering that has been caused to victims and their loved ones, and we are committed to ensuring that they receive the justice and redress that they so deserve.”
Following criticism of its document disclosure by Mr Beer, the Post Office said it had disclosed the “vast majority” of documents needed for the next round of hearings in a timely way.
But it said it regretted that “a very small proportion of documents were not disclosed as early as all parties would have liked”.
