Secretive Crown Office refuse to reveal details of meetings between Post Office and Horizon

Scotland’s Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain — **Dorothy Bain KC, who as Lord Advocate is now head of the Crown Office.**

By Lucy Ashton

Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has a sin to answer for with her Secret Scotland strategy which has crept like a bad disease through national and local politics.

It has permeated down to councils such West Dunbartonshire where their chief communications official Amanda Graham, pictured right, has taken it upon herself to ban The Democrat, refusing to speak to us on important matters of public interest.

We cannot establish which committee of the council made the decision to impose the ban, or if it was passed democratically, because no one at the council will speak to us.

Just this week, we discovered that they have now blocked our e mails and have appear to have cut us off from the council press release service.

Bill Heaney, who edits and owns The Democrat, said: “This all started when the then SNP leader of the administration, Jonathan McColl, said we would not be allowed to attend meetings and we were thrown out of one in the Burgh Hall.

“The SNP was in power at the time and have now been replaced as the administration by Labour who are astonishingly upholding the ban.

“This is anti-democratic, it contravenes the spirit of free speech and open and honest discussion of matters of public interest. It rejects freedom of the press and reflects badly on the council.

“We have been referred to the council’s customer service department but knowing how the council deals so cack-handedly with the simplest of complaints even about residents not having their bins lifted, we are not inclined to go down that road.”

Meanwhile, Scotland’s Crown Office is the latest public organisation to be blasted after refusing to reveal key details about secretive meetings officials held with the Post Office between 2013 and 2015 about the Horizon scandal.

Prosecutors did not fully stop pursuing sub-postmasters until 2015 despite being warned about the potentially faulty system two years below.

It has been confirmed that the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is currently undertaking a review of the up to 100 cases in Scotland where Post Office staff could have been wrongly convicted of fraud or embezzlement.

But there is a divide in how this is to be approached, with Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain wanting it on a case-by-case basis, and Humza Yousaf calling for a blanket pardon.

But now the Scottish Daily Express can reveal that the prosecution service held talks with the Post Office twice in 2013, once by phone and once in person about Horizon. But the details of these discussions have been kept secret. A meeting also took place on October 6 2015, after which the Crown issued guidance to stop targeting sub-postmasters based on the evidence provided.

In response to a freedom of information request from this website, an official wrote: “I consider that there is a strong public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of information received by the Procurator Fiscal in connection with allegations of criminality.

“This is both during criminal proceedings and after they have concluded. The information within correspondence between COPFS and the Post Office is held for the purposes of an investigation which the department has a duty to conduct to ascertain whether a person should be prosecuted for an offence.

A month later, new guidance was created for prosecutors to consider every case reported by the Post Office on individual facts and circumstances, and then in October 2015, a new policy to not include Horizon evidence was drafted up. In 2019 and 2021, civil cases in England revealed the extent of the problems, with appeal and reviews able to proceeds.

A Crown Office spokeswoman added: “As an independent and impartial prosecution service, COPFS is determined to ensure that all miscarriages of justice resulting from unreliable Horizon evidence are identified and overturned. We are committed to public understanding of the role of Scotland’s prosecutors in these cases and will provide information when it is appropriate to do so, respecting the ongoing legal processes.”