A former top Post Office executive has denied claims of “bullying” and “intimidating” behaviour towards a wrongly convicted subpostmistress.

Angela van den Bogerd also told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry in central London that issues raised by colleagues relating to the Horizon IT system were “outside my knowledge scope”.

On her second day of giving evidence at the inquiry on Friday, Ms van den Bogerd was asked about the cases of several individual subpostmasters and their branches.

Sam Stein KC described the helpline asking subpostmasters to pay shortfalls as committing “fraud”, and asked Ms van den Bogerd if she thought it was fair.

She replied her expectation would be “they would get some help” to try and understand where the shortfall came from.

Mr Stein focused on subpostmistress Jennifer O’Dell, who was accused of stealing thousands of pounds from her branch in Cambridgeshire and called the helpline numerous times to refute any wrongdoing.

Ms van den Bogerd said Ms O’Dell should have been called back and her case should have been escalated.

Mr Stein then said: “You were intimidating and bullying towards her [Ms O’Dell], telling her that she had stolen the money and, if she didn’t, Post Office would take her home away.”

Ms van den Bogerd replied: “That conversation did not happen.”

The inquiry was earlier shown an email, from fraud analyst Helen Rose sent to Ms van den Bogerd on February 13 2013, about the audit record query (ARQ) logs being provided by Fujitsu for use in court.

Ms Rose expressed concerns that in some cases the logs “would not be giving a true picture” in court, and later said: “I don’t know where to go with this.”

Asked by Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, if Ms Rose was raising a broader issue about IT systems, Ms van den Bogerd said: “That’s not how I read this.”

Ms van den Bogerd confirmed she did not do anything with the contents of the emails and that she expected Ms Rose to raise the issue “through her reporting line”.

Mr Beer asked: “That didn’t ring any alarm bells?”

She replied: “Not for me at the time.”

Mr Beer continued: “Is it one of those things that it’s just somebody else’s job, Ms van den Bogerd?”

She said: “Well it was outside my knowledge scope, so I wouldn’t have had the knowledge to know what to do with that.”

She added: “Now, I would obviously look at this very, very differently.”

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