Post Office accused of withholding documents from IT scandal inquiry
The Post Office has been accused of withholding thousands of documents from the inquiry into anIT scandal that led to more 700 unsafe convictions.
The Post Office IT inquiry resumed on Tuesday with a strongly worded row over the failure to disclosure more than 30,000 documents. Lawyers for the unfairly convicted operators accused the Post Office of continuing to deploy “malevolent” tactics to frustrate justice.
They also called for the inquiry to be adjourned until all the relevant documents were made available.
A lawyer for the Post Office strenuously denied the claims. The dispute provided a foretaste for what is set to be a hotly contested second phase of the inquiry into one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
Edward Henry KC, representing one group of post office operators, suggested the Post Office needed to be trained to comply with disclosure orders.
He said: “I’m afraid I can’t use the analogy of a puppy because of course the Post Office are far more sinister and I regret to submit malevolent animal, but you have to train an unruly participant.”
Henry said the Post Office had continued to show “contempt for the process”, adding: “It has demonstrated time and time again that it cannot be relied upon or trusted to comply with court orders.”
He said the Post Office was “an institution which seems incapable of acting fairly towards those it has maimed and marred”.
He added: “To the core participants we represent, the Post Office exercised almost total power over them. It treated them contemptuously it subverted the rule of law to suit its own agenda. It twisted, distorted and overrode vital processes in both civil and criminal courts, depriving the core participants of vital rights which meant
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