Angela van den Bogerd, a former senior director at the Post Office, arrived at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday morning. She began with an apology on the first of her two days of giving evidence, telling the inquiry she was "truly, truly sorry" for the "devastation" caused to wrongly convicted sub-postmasters and their families. Errors in the Post Office's Horizon IT system meant money appeared to be missing from many branch accounts when, in fact, it was not. As a result, more than 700 sub-postmasters were handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015. Report by Jonesia. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Ms Landenberger, why did you prosecute innocents of post-mortem?
00:05I'll be giving all my answers to the inquiry today, thank you.
00:07Have you got any apologies before you go in this morning?
00:09I've got nothing to say until I give my answers to the inquiry.
00:11Did you lie about what you knew?
00:13As I said, I've got nothing to say until I give my answers to the inquiry, so...
00:17Thank you very much.
00:30This is the interim report.
00:38Saying sorry and no doesn't change what's happened,
00:41but I do want to say to everyone impacted by wrongful convictions
00:45and wrongful contract terminations
00:47that I am truly, truly sorry for the devastation caused to you,
00:51your family and friends.
01:01In your witness statement,
01:03you don't apologise for anything that you did wrong, do you?
01:06I apologise for not getting to the answer more quickly,
01:11but with the evidence I had and the parameters of my role at the time,
01:16I did the best I could and to the best of my ability.
01:20What you say is you blame Fujitsu
01:22for not being transparent with you and the post office.
01:25I'm... Yes.
01:27Ah, Angela Vandenberghe is head of network services.
01:30Bob Rutherford from Second Sight.
01:32Angela, nice to meet you.
01:34Here to help.
01:36We've pulled a dozen files for you to look at
01:39for the cases the MPs have been pushing.
01:50You had been given information on 5th December 2010
01:56that Fujitsu can actually put an entry into a branch account remotely.
02:01Agreed? In that email chain, yes.
02:10It makes me feel really, really angry
02:12because she is to blame
02:15as ultimately she had the final decision.
02:19In my particular case, she had the final say.
02:24She could have overturned the decision of the contracts advisor
02:28and reinstate me, but she decided to go against that.