The judge who shopped the operator of Horizon system
Viewers watching the new ITV drama about the Post Office scandal will have noticed a well-dressed and bespectacled High Court judge presiding over affairs The verdict of the real life Justice Sir Peter Fraser KC in Bates and Others v Post Office Ltd[1] saw 550 sub-postmasters win GBP58 million. Sir Peter ruled that the fault was with the computer system, and identified almost 30 glitches.
He sent a letter in January 2020 to Sir Max Hill KC, the former director of public prosecutions (DPP), stating that the trial found evidence that Fujitsu knew about the existence of bugs, errors and defects in Horizon software. Errors spanned from 1999 to 2018, with a total of 28 known glitches. In the letter to the DPP, Sir Peter pointed out that important evidence given to both the Crown and High Courts was “not true, and was known not to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.
Both Gareth Jenkins and Anne Chambers, Fujitsu employees who gave expert witness statements, knew about bugs and did not disclose this when their evidence was used in the cases of Seema Misra and Lee Castleton, respectively, Sir Peter said. Ms Chambers wrote in an email on Feb 23 2006 that a specific bug, the Callendar Square issue, had been around for years and “affects a number of sites most weeks”. However, in court just three days later, she said that the issue was an isolated one and that there was no evidence it also occurred at Mr Castleton’s branch.
Sir Peter’s actions led to Operation Olympus[2], which saw the police launch an investigation into the two Fujitsu engineers. Both worked closely together and were interviewed under caution in 2021. As part of the legal wrangling the Post Office lawyers tried to get Sir Peter taken off the case in a last-ditch attempt to salvage their chances of winning, but failed.
Sir Peter attended a local state secondary school, Harrogate Grammar School in North Yorkshire, before reading law at Cambridge. He was called to the Bar in 1989 and practised as a barrister from 1990 until he became a recorder of the Crown Court in 2002, and Queen’s Counsel (now King’s Counsel) in 2009. Sir Peter was appointed a High Court judge in 2015 and ruled on various high-profile cases such as:
Awarding the Premier League more than GBP150 million from a Chinese broadcaster Sentencing a mentally unwell son to indefinite hospitalisation after he beheaded his mother Ruling that Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages were admissible in court as evidence on Covid-testing contracts
Imprisoning the girlfriend of the Babes in the Wood killer for six years Blocking a council’s outsourcing of children’s health services to Virgin Ordering mining giant Glencore to pay GBP281 million in penalties after committing “corporate corruption on a widespread scale” across Africa
Fining Croydon tram operators and TfL GBP14 million for safety failings that led up to the death of seven people in a 2016 tram crash
References
- ^ Bates and Others v Post Office Ltd (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ Operation Olympus (www.telegraph.co.uk)