Post Office investigator used ‘gangster ways’ to gather ‘bounty’

A Post Office investigator and his colleagues ‘behaved like Mafia gangsters’ trying to ‘acquire bounty with threats and lies’, the general public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal heard yesterday.

Stephen Bradshaw interviewed a string of postmasters wrongly accused of stealing cash beneath warning, berating them for telling ‘a pack of lies’.

Mr Bradshaw, who has been on the Post Office for greater than 45 years, allegedly ‘hounded’ one girl in additional than 60 calls the place he referred to as her a ‘b****’ in ‘extraordinarily distressing’ conversations.

A disabled sub-postmistress stated he positioned her in a ‘tiny parcel raise’ to interview her beneath warning which has left her with ‘anxiousness’.

It was put to him that he used ‘language you would possibly see in a Nineteen Seventies detective present’, to which the investigator stated: ‘The questions should be requested.’ He additionally stated it was ‘incorrect’ to state he and colleagues ‘behaved like Mafia gangsters trying to acquire their bounty with the threats and lies,’ as one postmaster alleged.

Mr Bradshaw was the primary witness to seem on the hearings because the airing of the explosive ITV drama, Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, provoked outrage.

In a witness assertion put earlier than the panel chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, he stated: ‘I refute the allegation that I’m a liar.’

Mr Bradshaw was concerned within the prison investigation of 9 sub-postmasters, together with Liverpudlian Rita Threlfall in 2010, who he quizzed over a £33,000 shortfall. The wheelchair-bound subpostmistress stated she was positioned in a ‘tiny parcel raise’ to take her upstairs to be interviewed beneath warning. He requested her the color of her eyes and what jewelry she wore and, when she answered, replied: ‘Good, so we have got an outline of you for after they come.’

Ms Threlfall stated she is ‘nonetheless shaken’ by the expertise and suffers ‘crippling anxiousness and melancholy’. Mr Bradshaw insisted the raise was ‘not a small parcel raise’ and is ‘wheelchair accessible’.

Former postmistress Shazia Saddiq stated she obtained greater than 60 ‘significantly intimidating’ calls from the investigator who ‘did not determine himself’ in 2016.

He allegedly would ask: ‘Where’s the cash gone? Why will not you speak to me?’ Ms Saddiq stated: ‘I refused to talk to him as a result of I didn’t know who he was.

‘In that decision . . .he referred to as me a bitch, which I discovered extraordinarily distressing.’ Mr Bradshaw referred to as it ‘unfaithful’, denied ‘hounding’ her and insisted he would at all times say who he was on a name.

But Ms Saddiq’s husband was listening to the alternate on speakerphone and confirmed it.

Jacqueline McDonald claimed she was ‘bullied’ by Mr Bradshaw over a £94,000 shortfall in 2010. A transcript of his interview was learn by Julian Blake, counsel to the inquiry, the place the investigator asks her: ‘Would you want to inform me what occurred to the cash?’

When she stated she did not know, he responded: ‘You have instructed me a pack of lies.’

Katie Noblet, who was employed by Ms McDonald, wrote to the Post Office to complain ‘concerning the unprofessional, disgusting behaviour and actions’ of Mr Bradshaw and his colleague.

Ms McDonald, of Preston, was convicted of theft and 6 counts of false accounting and sentenced to 18 months in jail after a plea discount to simply accept the false accounting cost was rejected. It was later overturned.

The inquiry was proven Mr Bradshaw’s self-appraisal for that 12 months the place he bragged he persuaded attorneys to push ahead with a trial for theft, too. He stated that an accepted denial of theft on the idea she blamed Horizon ‘would given credence’ to the subpostmasters’ marketing campaign for justice.

Mr Blake stated it seems he noticed it as ‘profession boosting’ to push for additional costs and requested if getting appraisal rating would assist get a bonus. Mr Bradshaw stated: ‘It might do and it might not do relying on who seems on the kinds.’

He and fellow investigator Anthony Gardener additionally quizzed Lisa Brennan over a £3,482 shortfall in 2003 as a part of a probe that noticed her wrongly convicted of 27 counts of theft. A transcript reveals Mr Bradshaw, referring to the supposedly lacking cash, telling her: ‘I do not suppose it is carelessness.’ Mr Gardener stated: ‘Nobody else is making errors such as you.’

Ms Brennan, from Merseyside, misplaced her marriage and was left homeless along with her daughter following her wrongful conviction.

Asked if he and Mr Gardener had behaved ‘professionally’, Mr Bradshaw instructed the inquiry: ‘Yes.’

In an interview beneath warning with Janet Skinner, who was jailed after being wrongly convicted of stealing almost £60,000 in 2007, Mr Bradshaw instructed her to ‘stand up earlier’. Ms Skinner wrongly suspected a member of employees who opened her Post Office within the mornings, to which Mr Bradshaw steered she had ‘rewarded’ a suspected thief ‘by giving her the keys’.

Ms Skinner stated she needed to get the lady to open up as clients complained she was ‘arriving late’, to which Mr Bradshaw stated: ‘Get up earlier. Your duty, you took the function of being sub-postmaster.’

Mr Bradshaw instructed the inquiry he was not ‘technically minded’ to know if there have been errors with Horizon’s system. Yet he signed a witness assertion utilized in a 2012 prosecution the place he stated the Post Office has ‘absolute confidence within the robustness and integrity of its Horizon system’. He claimed the assertion was not in his phrases however that he was handed the draft and instructed to signal it by Post Office authorized agency Cartwright King. Mr Bradshaw stated: ‘In hindsight… there most likely ought to have been one other line stating, ‘These should not my phrases’.’

Edward Henry KC, who represents a few of the sub-postmasters, stated the investigator and his division ‘ignored something that did not match the narrative Horizon was working’.

Ms Saddiq, stated after the listening to: ‘Today the bully was requested questions and he did not prefer it.’