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Adam Crozier, who served as chief executive of Royal Mail for several years, and last month sidestepped any responsibility for the sub-postmasters scandal that happened on his watch, “falsified sales returns” in a former job to “enhance my reputation”.
Crozier, who headed Royal Mail when it owned the Post Office between 2003 and 2010, told the Post Office Horizon inquiry on April 12, that he didn’t recall “having involvement in or knowledge of the oversight of the investigations and prosecutions” and expressed “real regret” that the company wasn’t structured in a way that meant he and other senior board members were made aware of prosecutions being launched by the Post Office.
Crozier, when told that sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses raised concerns over the Horizon IT system when he was in post and were told to cover the shortfall, told the inquiry he always assumed “people check those things properly”.
When asked by Jason Beer KC if “responsibility did not rest” with Royal Mail for designing a structure in which none of its systems of oversight “picked up that this prosecutorial activity was even going on”, he said: “I think it is a matter of real regret that all of those checks and balances, the governance systems in both companies failed as well as internal and external audits, all the checks and balances that were put in failed to surface this issue, out of the Post Office to a wider set of people.” Former employees whose lives had been ruined by the scandal had earlier called for Crozier to attend the inquiry (watch Crozier give evidence here).
Post Office insiders told the BBC in January that Crozier would have been aware of the problems with the Horizon system in his role as Chief Executive of Royal Mail.
The Post Office scandal is described as one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in British legal history and involved more than 900 sub-postmasters being wrongly prosecuted, and some jailed, for stealing, because of incorrect information from a computer system called Horizon. The Post Office prosecuted 700 people between 1999 and 2015; another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service.
In 2017, a group of 555 sub-postmasters took legal action against the Post Office and two years later it agreed to pay them £58 million in compensation, but much of the money went on legal fees, the BBC reported. The broadcaster further noted that the Post Office spent £100m fighting the group despite knowing its defence was untrue.
While campaigners won the right to have their cases reheard, only 102 convictions had been overturned by March 2024. It is estimated that as of August 2023, at least 60 sub-postmasters had died without seeing justice or receiving compensation, and at least four had taken their own lives. As well as the inquiry currently underway, the Met Police is also investigating the Post Office over potential fraud offences.
In October 1999, just two days after Crozier’s appointment as the Chief Executive of the FA was made public, he was forced to apologise for dishonest conduct while working at the Daily Telegraph‘s advertising department. He admitted falsifying sales returns.
Crozier, then the joint chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, dismissed the matter as a “youthful indiscretion”, a BBC report noted at the time.
The Telegraph said Crozier came close to losing his job in the 1987 incident, and was moved from the paper’s main London office to Scotland, and left the company soon afterwards, the BBC report said.
Crozier said he changed notes regarding advertising sales “in order to enhance my reputation”, saying it was the “mistake of a young man” that resulted in no personal gain “whatsoever”.
He said the Daily Telegraph accepted his explantation and “what happened was never repeated again”.
Crozier said in July 1988 he was offered a job by Saatchi & Saatchi “and they employed me knowing fully the situation and saw it fully for what it was”, and that he had spent the last 12 years “developing an impeccable record – and have dealt with the Daily Telegraph on many occasions”.
He apologised to the FA for not making them aware of the incident and said he had apologised “unreservedly for any embarrassment I may have caused”.
The Guardian details more background on Crozier’s employment history in this article from October 1999 covering the Telegraph incident.