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From: Jane MacLeod, GRO
Sent: Thur 14/02/2019 02 PM (UTC)
To: Paula Vennellsf “GRO, ; Alisdair
Cameron{”
Cc: Rob Hou:
Woodley. _
Mohinder Kang
Veronica Branton oo vessmunnnns
Williams; GRO !
Subject: Postmaster Litigation - CONFIDENTIAL AND SUBJECT TO LEGAL PRIVILEGE - DO NOT
FORWARD
All
We have had 2 Court hearings this week in relation to the Postmaster Litigation. Key points were:
Common Issues Judgement
e The judge advised us this morning that he is on track to deliver his draft judgement at the end of February —
although he flagged that this may slip a few days. So my expectation is that we will receive the embargoed
judgement between Thursday 28 February and Tuesday March S**. As the Horizon trial starts on Monday 11°,
I anticipate that the formal judgement is most likely to be handed down on Thursday 7"/Friday 8", although
this is not definitive.
e ~~ We have the next Litigation Steering Committee on Tuesday and will revisit the contingency planning in light
of that timeframe.
Horizon Trial
e We had the Pre-Trial Review this morning at which the timetable for the trial was agreed as follows:
© Monday 11' — Opening submissions (1/2 day each)
© Tuesday 12" — Thursday 21**— non-expert witnesses. For the Claimants this includes 5 postmasters
from the wider claimant group (not lead claimants), Richard Rolls (formerly of Fujitsu and the source
of the remote access allegations), and lan Henderson of Second Sight. For Post Office we have
approximately 12 witnesses including Angela and other Post Office witnesses, as well as a number of
Fujitsu witnesses.
o Monday 25 — Friday 29 : the Court is not sitting due to Brexit contingency plans
© Monday 1/4 - Friday 5/4 — expert evidence (2 1/2 days per expert)
o w/c 8/4 -closing submissions — thd
¢ Overall we are satisfied with this timetable.
e We successfully sought to restrict the evidence of lan Henderson to matters of fact only, and not matters of
‘opinion’ (which would have potentially brought in commentary from the various Second Sight reports) with
the judge stating that he did not expect Mr Henderson’s cross examination to last more than an hour,
although Nick Wallis has already tweeted that we ‘lost’ on this point.
e — All expert evidence has now been filed and our team has been responding to the new material raised in Jason
Coyne’s (the Claimant’s expert) supplementary statement. Based on the work done to date (which is not yet
complete) we believe that there are in most cases, reasonable responses to the new issues. Rob has also
commented on the issues raised, and will be meeting the Counsel team on Monday to assist with the strategic
positioning.
3" Trial
e@ The scope of this trial was determined at the CMC on Tuesday. The 4 week trial starting on 4 November will
address breach and limitation issues using 2 of the lead claimants as examples. This will therefore address the
issue as to whether these claims - which would otherwise be ‘time-barred’, can in fact be included. In order
for the Claimants to do this, they must establish deceit, concealment or mistake by Post Office. This issue
affects almost half the Claimant group.
e In addition there will also be a consideration of the measure of loss suffered by 4 of the lead claimants; that
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is, how a Claimant’s loss should be calculated when their contract termination involved a breach of duty by
Post Office.
e The judge also set out the timetable by which the various process steps must be completed between now and
November and set dates for further CMCs.
e Again, we felt that overall the CMC went well for us with the Judge’s decision reflecting the orders we had
requested.
4" Trial
¢ The Court also determined that there will be a 4" trial in March 2020 (also for 4 weeks) and has specified the
process for selecting Test Claimants. The rationale for this trial will be to assess the claims of a wider group
than the current six Lead Claimants.
We will update the Board and UKGI along the above lines, and the Board Litigation sub-Committee is scheduled to
meet next Thursday at which the Horizon QC Tony de Garr Robinson, will provide his view of the strengths and
weaknesses of the expert reports.
I can provide a further update at GE on Monday if required.
Jane
Jane MacLeod
Group Director of Legal, Risk & Governance
Ground Floor
20 Finsbury Street
LONDON
EC2Y 9AQ
Mobile number:!