The former Post Office general counsel, Jane MacLeod, who avoided questioning during the statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal, will not escape a police investigation, despite living abroad.
According to one source, during a meeting updating victims on the Operation Olympos police investigation into the scandal, police representatives were asked whether individuals who are abroad could be questioned. Attendees at the update meeting were told they could, and, unprompted, a member of the investigation team named the former legal chief as an example.
MacLeod headed the Post Office’s legal department from 2015 to 2019, during a period when the organisation was attempting to quell the emerging scandal. Perjury and perverting the course of justice are two of the offences being investigated by Operation Olympos, which is nationwide, but led by the Metropolitan Police.
MacLeod refused to face the Post Office scandal public inquiry and, as a non-UK citizen living in Australia, the inquiry did not have the power to compel her to attend, but the police could travel to Australia to question her.
The period in which MacLeod headed up the Post Office legal department included the High Court battle with subpostmasters, which she regularly attended. The Post Office spent more than £100m in taxpayers’ money attempting to prevent subpostmasters from proving the faulty Horizon system was to blame for unexplained account shortfalls.
In 2015, MacLeod wrote a threatening letter to Computer Weekly as it was investigating and reporting on the scandal.
One former subpostmaster said: “For someone who took such a keen interest in the trials to not show up for the inquiry speaks volumes because she could have given them lots of useful information.”
In a written statement in May 2024, inquiry chair Wyn Williams said the public inquiry “considered it important to hear oral evidence from Ms MacLeod”, adding: “Further, it offered to meet Ms MacLeod’s travel and accommodation expenses. However, Ms MacLeod has made it clear that she will not cooperate with the inquiry by providing oral evidence, whether by attending the inquiry in person or by giving evidence remotely via live video link.”
As she is a non-British national living outside the UK, Williams said he had “no adequate means of compelling MacLeod to attend pursuant to the Inquiries Act 2005”. He added that he had significant evidence relevant to the former legal boss. “I shall be able to compare what Ms MacLeod says in her witness statement alongside the extensive contemporaneous documentation I have received.”
The update also revealed that Operation Olympos currently has eight suspects and 53 persons of interest. Police have said the investigation is focused on the offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice, but charges of corporate manslaughter are also being considered.
There have also been concerns about funding, with project leaders emphasising the need for more of it. As revealed by Computer Weekly in August, the investigation into the Post Office Horizon scandal was then expected to cost taxpayers more than £50m in total.
Commenting on the Operation Olympos update, Sir Alan Bates, the former subpostmaster who led the fight for justice against the Post Office, said: “It was interesting to hear first-hand how the momentum of the investigation was building with the vast amounts of data they now have. But it will take time and I think people are clearer about that.”
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
