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Telephone attendance
Client: Royal Mail Group PLC Sub Postmaster Litigation
Matter: Mr Lee Castleton Matter no: 348035.134
Attending:
Name: Stephen Dilley Location: N/A Date: 6 December 2005
Start time: Units:
SJD3 having a tele;
telephone number {7
of 2 December to her,
ation with Helen Rose (nee Hollingworth) (her call)
I She had the following comments in response to my email
ting that paragraph numbering:
1. She is currently an Investigations Manager and has been since September 2004. Before
that she had been an Auditor at the Post Office for 5 years since February 1997. On
average she used to carry out one audit a day, sometimes more. She has 20 days per
year holiday plus Bank Holidays, so she probably has about 285 working days per year.
Over 5 years at one audit a day that works out as 1,425 audits. Possibly more, possibly
less if she didn’t do an audit every single day, but then this was probably balanced out
by the fact that sometimes she would do two, three and on one occasion four audits a
day. In other words, she was a very experienced auditor. In all her time, she never
encountered the sort of problem with Horizon that Mr Castleton alleges took place and
Horizon only came in very shortly after she started working at the Post Office.
2. No.
3. No, although Cath Olglesby was there that day. Chris Taylor is no longer with the Post
Office.
4. The audit involves physically counting the cash and stock at the Post Office and checking
the paperwork on hand. The auditors would then generate their own account which is
document P32. The sort of documents they would look at from the paperwork were P and
A Reports, Giro deposits and declared cash receipts (although she could not remember
whether she checked Declared cash receipts on this occasion).
a) She cannot remember
b) She cannot remember
¢) She thinks that Mr Castleton would have told her that. She thinks that he went
out of the branch during lunchtime and came back later strongly smelling of
drink.
d) She cannot remember.
e) The standard procedures are that the Post Office Master should make good
losses each week but Mr Castleton did not do so and he rolled over his losses.
f) She cannot remember.
However, she did tell me that there was a standard audit questionnaire and that she would
have asked Mr Castleton the questions on it. She will try and get hold of a copy and email it
to me.
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In laymans terms her conclusions were that Mr Castleton was fiddling the books. She
had never seen the Horizon system cause the problems that Mr Castleton said it was
causing. She thought in her words that he was “shifty”.
7. She might have asked Mr Castleton to print off spare copies of documents for her to take
away but wouldn’t have removed anything where he didn’t have a spare copy and she
wouldn’t have been interested in the daily snapshots. She couldn’t say either way
whether Cath Olglesby removed anything.
8. No, other than possibly to ring Cath Oglesby the following week to enquire as to whether
the new Sub Postmaster balanced.
My impression of Helen is that understandably her memory has faded over time and that she
will need to rely heavily upon her audit to refresh her memory of events. She doesn’t
remember some details that we would like, for example, about how long the safe was left
open for and why and what Mr Castleton said about it. However, she did come away with the
strong impression that he was fiddling.
Time engaged in telephone conversation and attendance note: 48 minutes
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