Former Royal Mail chief exec says he ‘was not aware’ group’s lawyers were prosecuting post office operators – as it happened

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Alan Cook, who was the managing director of Post Office, has just told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry that he was not aware until late in his tenure that the Post Office was the prosecuting authority in many of these cases.

I knew there were court cases. But I didn't realise that Post Office, in about two-thirds of the cases, had initiated the prosecution as opposed to, you know, the DPP or the police or whatever.

Reliance was placed on Royal Mail Holdings governance as well as Post Office Ltd governance. For example, producing the annual results and having the accounts audited was a process that would have been run through an audit committee, and that audit committee was at the Royal Mail Holdings level. I fully accept I was on the board of Royal Mail, but I'm just saying that from a Post Office Ltd board's perspective, they weren't the accountable party that.