A leaked report obtained by the BBC exposes that the Post Office spent £100m fighting sub-postmasters in court, knowing that its defence was false. The document, named Bramble, was created by Deloitte consultants and disclosed to the Post Office in 2017, revealing that missing funds could be the result of the Horizon IT system failing or remote tampering. However, despite being privy to this evidence, the Post Office continued to attribute the failure to theft or errors made by sub-postmasters. This stance can be seen in the Bates v Post Office High Court case, which lasted from 2018 until 2019 and resulted in a £100m cost to the Post Office.
The cost to the Post Office was incurred as a result of trying to defend its flawed system and wrongly prosecuting more than 900 sub-postmasters from 1999 to 2015. The Bates v Post Office case was fought by 555 sub-postmasters who argued that the Horizon system was at fault, not theft or mistakes by sub-postmasters. The report’s findings raise questions about whether Post Office lawyers acted with integrity and whether they misled the court. A spokesperson for the Post Office declined to comment on the matter.
The Bramble report was commissioned by the Post Office in 2016 but was never made available to sub-postmasters or the court during the trial. The report would have supported the sub-postmasters’ claims and could have had a significant effect on the trial’s outcome. The report shows that the remote tampering of accounts was going on without a sub-postmaster’s knowledge. The Post Office had initially denied this but later conceded that some Fujitsu employees could do this but claimed that it was being strictly monitored. According to Mr. Green, the sub-postmasters’ barrister, the landmark case should not have happened had the Post Office shared the Bramble report earlier
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