BEIS0001138 - Email from Tom Cooper to Minister Scully and Private Secretary re Post Office - CCRC dated 20 March 2020

Evidence on official site

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From: Cooper, Tom - UKGI{_ GRO

Sent: Fri 20/03/2020 12:52:16 PM (UTC)

To: Scully, Minist Permanent
Secretary, GRO dt

Ce: Creswell, Car! (Professional Business Services, Retail & Post

; Watson, Richard -
3} McInnes, Tim -
Scott, Joshua -

Subject:

As you know the CCRC is expected to make a decision on Tuesday about the criminal
convictions that it’s considering.

Separately POL has been taking legal advice and has already been advised that additional
disclosure needs to be made to all those where Horizon could have played a part in the evidence
at the time. There are approximately 570 of these cases. The additional disclosure relates as a
minimum to the operation of the Horizon system and the judgement in the Horizon trial. In
addition POL could well have to assess whether bugs/defects in the software affected balances in
individual cases.

There appear to be three basic scenarios in terms of what CCRC could say in relation to the cases
it is considering:

- No cases referred to the Court of Appeal

- Some, but not all cases referred to the Court of Appeal

- A general lack of disclosure by POL which could potentially lead to all the cases being
reopened

The second and third are considered most likely.

POL is considering how it will respond and we’ll get an update on Monday on their planning.
The lawyers are working on a couple of approaches to dealing with these cases now. One option
is to try to find a way to handle these cases on a group basis and I expect we might need to

discuss the outline of the options next week.

Tom

Sent from my iPhone

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