Between 1999 and 2015 hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office for offences including theft and false accounting on the strength of the faulty Horizon software.
On Thursday, the long running inquiry into the scandal was shown the draft report by Ron Warmington of accountancy firm Second Sight which raised serious concerns about Post Office investigations into sub-postmasters.
It said that investigators “often appear to have paid scant attention” to sub-postmasters who told them that they were innocent of fraud, or pointed out anomalies in transactions.
“They [investigators] seem to have shown little or no willingness to establish the underlying root cause of any given shortfall,” the report said.
This seemed to stem from a desire to “get the money back” from the sub-postmasters, “knowing that a false accounting convictions will provide a relatively inexpensive pathway to that goal”, it said.
“The overwhelming impression gained from reviewing the transcripts of investigative interviews is that the sub-postmaster was viewed as an enemy of the business,” the report added.
The investigations team seemed to presume that sub-postmasters were automatically guilty, rather than “seeking the truth”, the report said.
By failing to investigate what the sub-postmasters had been saying, or even to take proper notice of them, “the investigators have alienated all of them”, it said.
“It is that group (the sub-postmasters who evidently still believe themselves not only to be innocent but also to have been cheated by the Post Office) who really have become enemies of the business,” the report added.
Mr Aujard, who was general counsel at the Post Office from 2013 to 2015, said that “this is a specific case of a specific team allegedly behaving in a certain way… and I do agree, this reads as though that team is adopting an adversarial approach to their investigation”.
But he said a caveat was that the accountants writing the report had not interviewed the investigators themselves, but had written the report based on transcripts of sub-postmaster interviews by the investigators.
