Former Post Office managing director Alan Cook says he assumed the police and DPP were involved in prosecutions

Alan Cook said he had not previously encountered an organisation that could initiate prosecutions itself, and he describes it as “one of my regrets” that he didn’t “pick up on that earlier”.
He told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry:
I had assumed that the police/DPP had been involved. I shouldn’t have presumed, but I did presume, sadly. And then “it had gone to court” was the expression they used. I had not encountered the notion of an organisation that could make that decision on its own. And I suppose I had too much assumed knowledge. And when you see the words that were written, I can see why that view still perpetuated in my mind, because it didn’t overtly say “We have taken the decision to prosecute.”
Chair Wyn Williams interjects, and says:
As I understand it, it follows from what you’re saying that when you became the managing director, no one within the company Post Office Ltd thought it necessary to tell you “And by the way, we prosecute people, in the sense that we don’t just investigate them, but we initiate and conduct the prosecution.”
Alan Cook says that is correct.
He is shown some minutes about court cases from a meeting he did not attend but would most likely have read at the time. The phrasing still did not, he says, strike him as meaning that Post Office Ltd was itself carrying out the prosecutions.
“I am not blaming others,” he said “It’s my misunderstanding, but I had just not encountered that type of situation.”
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