A former executive at the Post Office has apologised for celebrating the sentencing of a pregnant sub-postmaster to 15 months in jail for theft.
David Smith, who was managing director of the company between April and December 2010, apologised to Seema Misra and her family after he hailed her conviction in November that year as “brilliant news” in an email to colleagues.
Misra, from Surrey, was jailed after being wrongly convicted of stealing almost £75,000. At the time she was eight months pregnant, and had a ten-year-old son. Misra’s conviction was quashed in April 2021.
In a written statement to the inquiry published on Thursday, Smith said the email would have caused Misra “substantial distress” and he apologised.
“I would absolutely never think that it was ‘brilliant news’ for a pregnant woman to go to prison and I am hugely apologetic that my email can be read as such. Regardless of the result, I would have thanked the team for their work on the case.”
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Asked about the case during evidence, Smith said that at the time he and other Post Office executives had seen Misra’s case as a “test of the Horizon system”, with a conviction meaning it was robust.
Asked by Sam Stevens, counsel to the inquiry, if he took steps to oversee the conduct of the case, Smith said it had started before he joined the Post Office.
Pressed about the email, Smith said: “At the time what I’m doing here is generally what I do with lots of things in business. I’m saying to the team thank you for all your hard work, it’s terrific you got the result you got.”
He said he sent 200 to 300 emails a day. “In the benefit of hindsight and looking through the 2024 lens not the 2010 lens at best from Seema Misra’s perspective, you can see this is really poorly thought through — and I do apologise again for that.”
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Smith said that after Misra’s conviction, the subject of an inquiry into the Horizon IT system was not thought of again until he left the organisation.
Under questioning from Flora Page, on behalf of some sub-postmasters, Smith denied “closing his eyes” to problems with Horizon and using the Misra case as a way of “shoring up” the faulty IT system.
During the inquiry’s evidence session, Smith said he was assured by Post Office staff, including Paula Vennells, that the Horizon system was “tamper-proof”.
He also admitted that it had been “quite shocking” that large chunks of the same letter had been used by the Post Office to reply to MPs who had written about their concerns.
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Alan Bates, the campaigner played by Toby Jones in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, has previously criticised the “template” response by the Post Office to complaints about the IT system.
Questioned about the Post Office’s unique position as victim, investigator and prosecutor, Smith said he “didn’t really reflect on it in a way I should have done”.
“With the benefit of hindsight and in light of wrongful prosecutions I can see the inherent risks in prosecutions taking place in-house and not by an independent enforcement authority.”
Speaking after Smith had given evidence, Misra said she did not accept his apology. “They’re apologising now, but they missed so many chances before,” she told Sky News. “We had my conviction overturned, nobody came at that time to apologise. And now they just suddenly realised that when they have to appear in a public inquiry, they have to apologise.”
Smith said the Post Office executives did not investigate the IT system further because of “institutional bias” in the system that meant opportunities to dig deeper were missed.
Between 1999 and 2015 more than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted for stealing or false accounting because of faulty information given by the Horizon computer system. Some were imprisoned, some committed suicide and others were shunned by their communities.
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The inquiry also heard from Sir Michael Hodgkinson, a former chairman of the Post Office, who said he had been “saddened and appalled” by what happened but insisted he had never been told of early concerns raised about the system.
