I think yesterday's evidence demonstrated one of the problems with corporate governance.
Part time non-executive directors have two main functions. They should use their knowledge and experience to help guide the business, and they should hold the business to account. This works well when the CEO, executive directors and senior management are reasonably honest with the non-execs. It is problematic when the CEO, etc. lie to the non-execs and actively hide information from them. Non-execs often trust the CEO and their team unless and until it becomes blatantly obvious that there is a problem.
I know of two businesses, both much smaller than the Post Office, where the CEO got away with lying to the board for 2 years or more. In one case it came to an end when a member of the leadership team "accidentally" copied the chairman on an email that made it clear beyond any doubt that the CEO was lying to the board. Unfortunately, that came too late to save the business which collapsed into insolvency a few weeks later. In the other case, one of the non-execs eventually decided to visit the head office unannounced. They discovered that the CEO and CFO had been having an affair and were colluding to hide the true financial position from the board. In that case the business survived, but only because one of the non-execs gave it a large interest-free loan to cover the black hole in the accounts.
In Parker's case it is clear that the handover from Perkins was inadequate to the point of being almost non-existent. He was not aware that Perkins, the board and the civil service thought that Vennells was a dud. Vennells gave him a briefing on Horizon which she claimed to have written herself. It was actually written by Mark Davies, the PR guy, and was a pack of lies.
Parker then commissioned the Swift review. This review wasn't great but it did show that there were problems. Parker appears to have failed to grasp the seriousness of the shortcomings it uncovered. It is possible other non-execs or the government would have picked up on this if the review had been shared with them. However, Post Office set out to bury it. Jane MacLeod, Post Office's General Counsel, told Parker that the Swift review was legally privileged and that he couldn't share it with anyone. Many non-lawyers don't understand privilege so may have accepted her word on this, as Parker did. After all, she was an experienced lawyer. But she was lying. The document was not privileged and, as a lawyer, she knew full well that she as giving Parker false advice and that, in reality, his responsibilities as a director meant he was required to share the review with the board. Parker then made the mistake of expecting the legal department to implement the recommendations in the review. MacLeod seems to have led him to believe that she and her team were doing so. In reality, they were trying to bury it and, when the Bates legal action started, took the opportunity to come up with some advice saying that Parker should stop the work completely on grounds that sounded credible but were actually spurious.
Having said all that, it is clear that there were warning signs for Parker that he failed to pick up or act on (as was also the case for the non-execs in the two businesses I mentioned earlier). His attempt to say that the litigation was the best way of resolving matters ignores the Post Office's approach to the case. Given that Post Office claimed in court that the case posed an existential threat to them, Parker should have been far more involved than he was. If he had been involved, he would have seen that the Post Office's approach was to resist disclosure by denying the existence of documents that existed and, when that failed, by misrepresenting their contents and denying their relevance, even though they were clearly relevant. He would have seen that the Post Office was putting in dispute matters where they knew the subpostmasters were correct, a classic example of this being Post Office's insistence that Horizon had a "dispute" button that subpostmasters could use if they disagreed with Horizon's figures - there was never any such button. And he would have been aware that the Post Office's strategy in the litigation was to attempt to ramp up costs so that the subpostmasters would run out of money.
He was a semi-detached chairman who, at the most critical time for the business, sought to reduce his hours from 1.5 days a week to 2 days a month. I don't think anything he has done or didn't do crosses the line into criminality, but his failures as chairman enabled those who were conducting what looks to me like a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.