Fundamentally.... under the radar?

The second post on Martin Smith's evidence picks up a phrase that John Scott offered up in the heat of the crisis that led to Susan Crichton leaving the Post Office.

A passage from Julian Blake during his examination of Martin Smith is the sole focus of this piece.

Readers may recall that John Scott, ex Met, Head of Security, alleged shredder or issuer of shredding instructions, blamed Susan Crichton for setting up a disclosure process which deliberately kept matters off the books or, in is words, under the radar. This was in the turmoil around Second Sight’s Interim Report. The Summer of 2013. Crichton left shortly afterwards.

The official story is that Cartwright King sought to stymie that through Simon Clarke’s Gareth Jenkins and Shredding advices, requiring a central hub of information relevant to disclosure and, you know, no shredding of documents.

Martin Smith gave protracted evidence about how the Post Office, under the influence he said of their civil lawyers (he means, I think, Rodric Williams and Bond Dickinson) began to undo this advice and may have ensured information was indeed, handled under the radar. They saw this as legitimate protection of the Post Office’s reputation and interests of the Post Office in civil litigation.

Here is the clearest example.

It is prompted by events in 2016. During one of the regular conference calls between Post Office and Cartwright King a bug (the “Wimbledon matter”) is raised.

Smith asks for assurance that there have been no prosecutions based on this kind of incident because it relates to a discrepancy. It transpires problems of this kind may date back as far as 2005. Smith asks lots of pertinent questions including on which branches might be affected. One of the problems is that discrepancies double up.

Because it might be disclosable in the group litigation, Rodric “I continued to work at the Post Office on appeals and compensation claims at least until recently” Williams asks for no email traffic on the matter.

I pause here for dramatic effect.

Smith says he did not think this improper because there would still be a central record of the problem and he accepted the broader case against having email traffic on problems which Bond Dickinson had offered. To paraphrase this broader case it was: the risks of accidental disclosure of incorrect speculation through cascades of emails make it dangerous.

What was dangerous about not emailing about issues of concern, we are being led gently to…

Some weeks later, it is noted that ,“Wimbledon can be taken off this agenda: Martin and Rodric catching up off-line.” Smith says: “Rodric Williams did not want additional material preparing from the civil litigation perspective, that was his call, not mine.”

Mr Blake draws the story together:

Mr Blake: Mr Smith, after all that you’ve been through, after all that we discussed yesterday, finding out about unreliability of Gareth Jenkins, finding out about bugs, errors and defects that hadn’t been disclosed in criminal proceedings, proceedings that you were involved in, proceedings that led to the imprisonment of a subpostmaster, finding out about a request from Mr Scott to shred documents or destroy documents, surely you couldn’t have thought, at this point in time, that catching up offline, in relation to an issue about a bug, was an appropriate action to take?

Martin Smith: When it says “offline”, it’s not offline completely; it’s just not simply within this call.

Mr Blake: Is that really your evidence?

Martin Smith: Well –

Mr Blake: There was a meeting, a previous meeting, where Mr Williams asked for no email traffic.

Martin Smith: Yes. Well, at the end of the day, he is the client. He is saying, “I do not want any email traffic”. This has been flagged up, it is now in our database. It is now in the central record.

Mr Blake: You’re having private meetings that no electronic record is being kept of?

Martin Smith: I – well, it wouldn’t be in an email but I would have had notes in my notebook.

Mr Blake: So you were keeping a fully disclosable note of this issue for the purposes of disclosure?

Martin Smith: I was keeping notes.

Mr Blake: Were you providing that to the central hub?

Martin Smith: No, they were my personal notes. I left – the notes that I made at Cartwright King were – remained at Cartwright King. Now, this is after I left Cartwright King but I was still keeping notes.

I pause here to note how disjointed that answer is.

Mr Blake: So what’s the purpose of the central hub if you’re keeping notes that are kept in your office that aren’t kept in your central hub and that you’re corresponding offline?

Martin Smith: Well, the central hub is to be able to provide information to anyone who needs it. My notes were an aide memoire, so I could quickly look at things.

Mr Blake: You were discussing bug in Horizon that was affecting branches and causing discrepancies?

Martin Smith: But it’s been flagged up in the hub.

Mr Blake: It’s been flagged up but the discussion about it, a discussion about how longer it’s been going on for, whether it affects prosecutions, none of that’s in the hub, is it?

Martin Smith: Not on the basis of this record, no.

Mr Blake: The answer to the questions you were asking earlier, does it affect prosecutions is being dealt with offline?

Martin Smith: I don’t believe that I thought of it in that way at the time because the file review process had been completed, disclosure had been made to those who senior counsel had advised it be made to and we had been informed that we did not need to go looking for cases prior to 1 October 2010. So this was something that had been flagged up. It was something that an expert could opine on in due course.

That expert would have needed to look under the radar to opine. And they would have had to look back to 2005.