Post Office was 'stringing MPs along' with a 'behind-the-scenes deception process', former Tory minister Lord Arbuthnot told inquiry
Post Office was 'stringing MPs along' with a 'behind-the-scenes deception process', former Tory minister Lord Arbuthnot told inquiry
Lord Arbuthnot sent a letter in 2009 to then-business secretary Lord Mandelson, asking what could be done to investigate complaints made by sub-postmasters about theLord Arbuthnot leaving Aldwych House, central London, after giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry “What this ‘arm’s length’ arrangement essentially means is that the Government is refusing to take the responsibilities that go with ownership and I don’t think it’s right to do that for various reasons.
He asked Lord Arbuthnot if he would have known at the time that it may have been a false statement, to which he replied: “No, I wouldn’t.” “They were operating some sort of behind-the-scenes deception process which suggests to me now that they were stringing MPs along in order to preserve the robustness of Horizon, the existence of Horizon and possibly the existence of the Post Office.He also said that an internal investigation carried out by the Post Office was an “asset recovery process,” and not an “application for justice”.
It was possible for the Post Office to access the Horizon system remotely and change accounts without sub-postmasters’ knowing, and the inquiry has previously heard that this feature of the software may have been what led to discrepancies in post office branches.
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