A former top Post Office executive has refused to apologise for her role in the Horizon IT scandal, insisting: “I didn’t knowingly do anything wrong”.Angela van den Bogerd began her evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry by saying that she is “sorry for the devastation” wrought on subpostmasters and their families.But when pressed by Inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC, Ms van den Bogerd insisted she had been unaware of critical flaws in the Post Office’s IT system.“You make no concession or admission that you did anything wrong”, said Mr Beer.Ms van den Bogerd replied: “I didn’t knowingly do anything wrong.”
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00:00But still, knowing what you know now, in your witness statement you don't apologise for
00:04anything that you did wrong, do you?
00:07I think that's one of the five main things you say in your witness statement, I'm going
00:11to summarise your witness statement, if I may.
00:15Firstly, I think you make no concessions or admissions that you did anything wrong, correct?
00:22I didn't knowingly do anything wrong, and I would never knowingly do anything wrong.
00:29You don't apologise for your role in any of the events being examined by the inquiry,
00:33do you?
00:34I think, and I've reflected on this quite a bit, and the disclosure that I've seen through
00:40this process, there are things that, documents that I've seen that I don't remember some
00:47of them from the time, but clearly, knowing what I know now, I would give further weight
00:54to some of those documents than I did at the time, so they would have more significance.
00:59So things like, things that I might have missed at the time, then I really regret that
01:05and I wish I'd been able to see that back then.
01:11But still, knowing what you know now, in your witness statement you don't apologise for
01:16anything that you did wrong, do you?
01:19I apologise for not getting to the answer more quickly, but with the evidence I had
01:26and the parameters of my role at the time, I did the best I could and to the best of
01:31my ability.
01:33What you say is you blame Fujitsu for not being transparent with you in the post office?
01:38Yes.
01:39That's the third thing you say, you lay the blame at Fujitsu's door.
01:42Well, from my perspective, because, you know, we'd set up the mediation scheme, we had
01:52reached out to Fujitsu in terms of being able to get the information from them for
01:56us to be able to do the investigations.
01:59They put a project manager in place that we funded to be able to get us access to the
02:05information that we needed.
02:09They knew what we were doing, yet we didn't get sight of any Kells.
02:13Now, I didn't know Kells existed and nobody that we were working with in the business
02:19knew that at the time.
02:21What I've subsequently seen through the disclosure and what some of this did come
02:25out as we were going through the GLO process is that there were people within the organisation.
02:31Within the post office?
02:32Within the post office that were aware of, I presume, known Enerologues, but I'm just
02:39talking about the service management kind of department where they would be dealing
02:44with Fujitsu at that level on a daily basis and working that through.
02:48Now, that wasn't available and I certainly wasn't aware of that when we were going through
02:53the scheme.