Current and former Post Office staff, lawyers and civil servants could all be questioned as part of the Metropolitan Police’s national investigation into crimes related to the Post Office Horizon scandal.
In an update of its Operation Olympos, Met Police commander Stephen Clayman, who is leading the investigation, said police will “go where the evidence takes” them, with no person or crime out of the scope of the investigation. He said there are 100 police officers from four regional units working on Olympos, which has already identified dozens of people of interest to the investigation.
More than 1.5 million documents are currently being reviewed and thousands of victims have been interviewed. The Met’s investigation will go back to the roll-out of the Horizon system in 1999.
The Post Office scandal saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly prosecuted due to unexplained account shortfalls that were caused by errors in the Horizon system. Thousands lost their livelihoods and had their lives turned upside down after repaying the unexplained losses.
The police investigation, initially looking at the potential crimes of perjury and perverting the course of justice, is in phase one, focused on “key individuals” involved in subpostmaster prosecutions. Phase two will investigate wider offences.
As Computer Weekly revealed, in 2020, the Met Police began assessing evidence of potential perjury offences committed by Fujitsu staff in criminal trials of subpostmasters prosecuted for accounting errors caused by a computer system.
In January that year, the director of public prosecutions (DPP) referred the concerns of High Court judge Peter Fraser about the accuracy of evidence given by Fujitsu staff in criminal trials to the Metropolitan Police. This followed his judgment that found errors in the Horizon system had caused the unexplained branch account shortfalls experienced by subpostmasters.
Three months later, the Met Police began assessing evidence of potential perjury offences. In November 2021, it opened a criminal investigation into Fujitsu staff who gave evidence in trials of subpostmasters. These were tech workers Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers.
This year, the Metropolitan Police set up a national investigation – now known as Operation Olympos – into the Post Office scandal. This followed public outrage stoked by ITV’s dramatisation of the Post Office scandal.
Clayman said police would initially investigate individuals for the possible crimes of perjury and perverting the course of justice, but did not rule out investigating the Post Office for fraud. This is in relation to its policy of forcing subpostmasters to repay unexplained shortfalls.
In October, during a public inquiry hearing, outgoing Post Office CEO Nick Read said it had so far been established that the Post Office took about £36m between 1999 and 2015 from subpostmasters, who were forced to cover shortfalls in their accounts that didn’t actually exist.
Operation Olympos is currently looking at individuals working or who have previously worked for the Post Office, staff at Fujitsu, which supplied the faulty software, and people in the legal profession involved in wrongful prosecutions, but Clayman said more individuals will fall into scope of the investigation as the operation progresses.
He added that the police will wait for the final Post Office Horizon public inquiry report before making final decisions on charging. “The subpostmasters and their families are at the heart of this investigation and our goal is to try and secure justice for those affected by this shocking set of events, the impact of which cannot be understated,” said Clayman.
He said there could be more victims yet to come forward. “I do know that if you take into account Post Office criminal and private prosecutions, civil claims and contract withdrawals, there are potentially thousands of victims who we are working hard to identify and build our database so that we can ensure we reach as many affected individuals as possible.”
Clayman spoke of positive responses from subpostmaster victims but warned: “It’s going to take time.”
The Met Police faces the possibility of investigating one of its own employees, with former Post Office investigator Graham Ward, who now works for the Met, revealed to have been involoved in the deletion of information from an expert witness statement during the wrongful prosecution of a subpostmaster.
During a Post Office scandal public inquiry hearing, evidence revealed that Ward made changes to a witness statement from Fujitsu IT expert Gareth Jenkins during the prosecution of Noel Thomas, a former subpostmaster in North Wales.
In 2006, while prosecuting Thomas, Ward removed a sentence from Jenkins’ witness statement, which confirmed errors existed in the Horizon system. Evidence revealed that he had suggested a Fujitsu tech expert should change his witness statement to remove the reference to a “system failure”.
In the email to Fujitsu staff, Ward wrote: “Given the allegations made by the postmasters, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s very much in ourselves’ and Fujitsu’s interest to challenge the allegations and provide evidence that the system is not to blame for the losses provided.” He removed it in his edit of the statement and it was left out of the final one.
Thomas spent his 60th birthday in prison, and had his wrongful conviction for false accounting overturned in April 2021.
The Operation Olympus team has launched a Major Investigation Public Portal where anyone can submit information and documents, and will be publishing a dedicated webpage to provide updates and resources.
Separately, the Met Police is investigating allegations that a senior Post Office worker, who is currently suspended, advised staff to destroy or conceal evidence of potential interest to the public inquiry.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).