The former Post Office chief accountant was described as the “keeper of the remote access secret”, the inquest heard.
Rod Ismay authored the first report into the faulty Horizon accounting system in August 2010, which concluded that the software was robust.
Hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongly convicted between 1999 and 2015 as a result of system failures.
Giving evidence at the inquiry, Mr Ismay rejected lawyer Flora Page’s description when she asked if he was “the Post Office’s custodian of remote access secrecy”.
The fact that agency accounts could be accessed remotely was significant evidence that weakened the convictions.
Page, the victims’ lawyer, questioned whether Ismay’s team “authorized” Fujitsu’s request for approval to remotely access Post Office accounts.
He responded that his team was “one of the people approached,” as shown in a “three-option document.”
When pressed about Fujitsu’s ‘routine’ account tampering and whether his Post Office team gave specific approval, he replied: “No, I don’t think so.”
Ismay also told the inquiry he had “other priorities” when asked why he did not highlight inaccuracies in his Horizon report after its publication.
An email exchange in December 2010, just a few months after their report was published, refers to evidence “that Fujitsu can actually place an entry into agency accounts remotely.”
He also described “a problem generated by the system” that “affected 60 agencies and caused a loss/gain that occurred in a given week to effectively disappear from the system”.
At the Post Office inquiry, Ismay was told that the email statement “damaged” his report.
He replied: “Looking at it now, yes, I can see that it undermines my report.” But he added that his report was “written before that.”
He continued: “Looking back, yes, I might want to revisit it, but I had other competing priorities going on…
“It might have been helpful to notify others that this issue had come to light, but in the context of everything I was doing, I don’t think it occurred to me at that time.”
Jason Beer KC responded by saying it was “a little beyond useful – perhaps essential?” to which Mr. Ismay agreed.
Later, Ismay was asked if he considered his report “a feather” in his “Post Office cap”, to which he replied that it had been “a matter of pride” to be able to explain why Horizon was robust at the time.
The inquiry heard how the ‘Ismay Report’ was produced in two weeks and that no independent report was carried out as part of it.
Ismay described his report as “not an investigation”.
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Three years after its completion, forensic accountants Second Sight released its first interim report in July 2013, highlighting flaws in the Horizon computer system that caused cash shortages.
Four months later, despite evidence pointing to knowledge of remote access and bugs in Horizon, Mr Ismay was described as saying that his report was “still valid”.
He told the inquiry he wished he had been able to highlight issues:
“…but with everything that was going on at that time,” he said, “I hesitate to keep saying that I forget things, but even a few years later, there are so many things going on that you don’t remember everything that happened.”
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He was asked why, despite the evidence, he continued to “sell the cap” of his 2010 report.
Ismay repeated that he had “a lot going on, and I would have continued to refer to that article.”
Jason Beer KC asked him if he “consciously” considered his report a “lodestar” despite information emerging that “directly undermined” it.
Ismay responded that he recognized that his response that he had “so many things going on” sounded “bad.”
The investigation continues on Tuesday with Mark Davies, the Post Office’s former director of group communications and corporate affairs, giving evidence.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
