Post Office legal chief Ben Foat has taken a leave of absence from the role amid the ongoing Horizon IT scandal, with legal director Sarah Gray assuming Foat’s duties on an interim basis, Daily Mail sister site This Is Money reported.

Foat has been with the Post Office since 2015, when he joined as head of legal for financial services before working his way up to become group general counsel in 2019, replacing Jane MacLeod, who was GC between 2015 and 2019.

His leave of absence comes as the Post Office reels from what has been labelled one of the UK’s widest miscarriages of justice. In Bates v Post Office, which settled in 2019, Mr Justice Fraser said denials about the existence of bugs in the Post Office’s faulty IT system was “the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat”.

The Post Office now concedes that between 1999 and 2015, 700 sub-postmasters (SPMs) were convicted in cases in which evidence provided by its faulty Horizon IT system may have featured. Many SPMs were subsequently jailed and financially ruined.

Foat was due to give further evidence to the Horizon inquiry last month, but the session was cancelled at the last minute after an inquiry team member fell ill, This Is Money reported. He is due to appear again in the autumn.

A spokesman at the Post Office confirmed to This Is Money that Foat is “temporarily away from the business”, but that it “cannot comment on individual employment matters”.  

Former Camelot legal director John Dillon has been appointed interim GC for the Horizon probe, the Post Office also told This Is Money.

Prior to joining the Post Office, Foat spent seven years as a senior legal counsel at Zurich Insurance. He previously worked in private practice at Kennedys in London, and Gadens and Sparke Helmore in Australia.

MacLeod, meantime, returned to her native Australia after leaving the Post Office and has since refused to appear at the Horizon inquiry. Only UK nationals can be legally compelled to give evidence in an official inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005.