Post Office in crisis after lawyer Ben Foat resigns

The Post Office has been plunged into further turmoil after the lawyer who led its response to the Horizon IT investigation stepped back.

Ben Foat has taken a paid leave from his role as group general counsel, the most senior internal legal position at the taxpayer-owned organization.

This comes as an independent inquiry into the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history is about to enter its final stages.

The scandal led to the Post Office prosecuting hundreds of innocent post managers following the introduction of the faulty Horizon computer system.

More than 700 of them were wrongfully prosecuted and jailed for theft, false accounting and other crimes between 1999 and 2015 in cases brought by the Post Office using faulty data.

Many more were declared bankrupt and suffered terrible stress and public embarrassment in the wake of evidence provided by the supposedly “secure” £1bn Horizon software system.

Thousands of victims are still waiting for compensation.

The news that Foat has stepped down is the latest turn in the revolving door in the Correos boardroom.

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week that chief executive Nick Read will keep his full salary despite his deputy being drafted in to do his day-to-day job as he prepares for the final stage of the Horizon inquiry, which is due to start in September.

The £60,000 Read will receive over seven weeks is slightly more than the £54,000 bonus he was forced to hand back for his previous work on the Horizon investigation amid a public outcry.

Read has also faced calls to resign over a letter in which he said the Post Office would support the prosecution of more than half of the subpostmasters convicted in the Horizon scandal.

Members of the Trade and Enterprise Committee expressed a lack of confidence in his leadership and accused him of providing misleading evidence.

Read was also criticised by the former head of human resources at the Post Office for being “obsessed” with his salary, which was £573,000 last year.

He also denied a claim by former Post Office chairman Henry Staunton that he had threatened to resign if he was not paid more than £1m. Staunton was sacked by former business secretary Kemi Badenoch in January.

He was sacked after claiming the Government had stalled compensation payments to subpostmasters until after the broadcast of the hit ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones, that month.

Further uproar was caused last month when finance director Alisdair Cameron retired with an estimated £1.2m severance package after being on sick leave since last year amid an alleged row with Read.

Foat, 45, was forced to apologise to the public inquiry last year after a document emerged using racist terms about wrongly convicted sub-postmasters, referring to some of them as “negroid types”.

The document circulated among Correos staff as recently as 2019.

It was a guide for fraud investigators, who were asked to group suspects according to 19th-century colonial-era racial characteristics, referring to people of African descent.

Foat was also criticised by inquiry chairman Sir Wyn Williams for the Post Office’s late disclosure of evidence, including the controversial racial profiling document.

“It is clear to me that the evidence he (Foat) has provided to me both in writing and orally is heavily dependent on his understanding of the information provided to him by others,” Williams said.

Foat was due to give further testimony last month.

The session was cancelled at the last minute after a member of the research team fell ill.

Foat is scheduled to appear before the inquest in the autumn.

The Post Office has confirmed that Foat is “temporarily out of business”.

“We cannot comment on individual employment matters,” a spokesman added.

He will be replaced by legal director Sarah Gray, who will take on day-to-day duties at Foat on an interim basis.

John Dillon, former legal director of lottery operator Camelot, has been appointed acting general counsel for the Horizon inquiry, the Post Office added.

Meanwhile, Read is being replaced on an interim basis by Owen Woodley, the deputy chief executive of the Post Office.