Brian Altman KC said leading Horizon engineer Gareth Jenkins had ‘possibly’ committed perjury.
A top lawyer brought in to advise the Post Office has told the Horizon IT inquiry it was “unhappily” the case that convicted or accused subpostmasters were not told about an expert witness withholding information about bugs in the system.
Emails shown to the inquiry on Wednesday from the time prior to Mr Altman being instructed showed the Post Office were keen to employ him because he had “the ear” of the director of public prosecutions and the Attorney General following his stint as first senior Treasury counsel between 2010 and 2013.
Mr Altman replied: “I can see immediately from that email it was not me who made that representation, but I can see probably it was that that attracted them.
The counsel to the inquiry then questioned Mr Altman on why he failed to disclose Mr Jenkins’s withholding of bugs in the Horizon system. The counsel to the inquiry continued: “Is the answer then that nothing was done to inform convicted defendants or in any ongoing cases, that Mr Jenkins had wrongly withheld his own knowledge of bugs in the Horizon system?”“Again, with the benefit of hindsight, and having thought an awful lot about this, it’s something that should have been considered for disclosure and disclosed in appropriate cases, no question.”The witness said: “Yes, I’m accepting that.
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