A barrister who advised the Post Office has told the inquiry into its IT system scandal that staff there defended Horizon with “an almost religious panic” and has claimed information was deliberately withheld from him. Simon Clarke told the Horizon IT inquiry he was “misled and deceived” throughout the scandal by Jarnail Singh and Rodric Williams, Post Office lawyers, particularly in the case of Seema Misra, the jailed sub-postmistress. Mrs Misra, who began running a branch in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005, was handed a 15-month prison sentence while eight weeks pregnant in November 2010 after being accused of stealing £74,000. Mr Clarke also described an instruction to shred meeting minutes about Horizon bugs allegedly given by John Scott, then the company’s head of security, as a “deliberate back-covering exercise”. Mr Clarke worked as a barrister for law firm Cartwright King at the time he advised the Post Office – and said he told the company to cease prosecutions after learning that leading Horizon engineer Gareth Jenkins had not disclosed knowledge about bugs in the system. More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted as a result of the Horizon scandal, which saw the software mis-record shortfalls on their accounts as...