Peter Limo did not invite Musa inside his house. He opened the pedestrian gate, brought out two glasses of water, and sat on a sun-faded plastic chair on the veranda. When Musa pulled out his phone, Peter pointed at the table.
“Put it there. Screen up.”
Musa complied.
“Recorder off?”
“Off.”
“And you are not using me as a shortcut to say I signed something I do not know.”
“I came to verify a date and a process, not to give you an accusation.”
Musa showed him Northgate’s certified comparison sheet, not the full annex. No client prices. No patient data. Just the approval reference carrying the initials `PL` and a date.
Peter read it without touching it, then gave a bitter laugh. “On that date I was already sitting at home like this.”
He opened his personal pension and employment portal and showed Musa the exit letter stored there. The final working day was clear. Musa did not take a photo. He wrote the date and a reference Peter could later verify through an independent request.
“Could the initials be part of a template?” Musa asked.
“They were. A reusable approval block for documents I had cleared. That was the problem. It was not a certificate-backed digital signature. When I left, I asked them to remove it.”
“Why?”
“Because if you leave an approval mark inside a template, someone can copy the document and it still looks as if Legal saw it.”
Peter said Meridian had once maintained two document workflows. `CLIENT_FINAL` was supposed to be controlled by Legal and to contain signed annexes, change orders, and client approvals. `BLUE_OPS` belonged to Sales Operations and had begun as an internal checklist for response targets, substitute stock, and logistics routes.
“The problem started when operational wording began to look like contract rights,” Peter said. “I asked Victor why Sales Ops had sentences that looked like clauses. He said it was for speed. Sales did not want to wait for Legal every time an equivalent model was used.”
“Did you approve it?”
“I approved a compatibility-process checklist. I did not approve automatic client consent. People started blurring those two things.”
Peter found a resignation email he had sent from his personal account after receiving his exit pack. It contained one line: **Please remove my approval block from all reusable templates after my final date.** He allowed Musa to note the subject and date, not copy the whole email.
“Does that mean Victor created the Blue annex?” Musa asked.
Peter’s face hardened. “Did you hear me say that?”
“No.”
“Then do not put me in that sentence. I saw the workflow and the authority dispute. I did not remain there for the next two years.”
Musa wrote a narrow summary: Peter could verify his exit date, the folder names, his objection to a reusable approval block, and the distinction between a legal client file and a Sales Operations workflow. He could not verify later edits.
“That is better,” Peter said.
When Musa mentioned that Northgate receiving notes carried `BLU-24`, Peter leaned forward.
“Now you are looking in the right place.”
“Why?”
“Because Blue was operations. If the code appears in dispatch, you have moved beyond a paper theory. You are looking at what happened to an actual shipment.”
Peter agreed to speak to Northgate if it sent an official request, but only within those facts. Before Musa left, Peter showed him a personal clearance checklist with `system access terminated` and the same exit date. It did not prove who later reused the template, but it made Peter’s boundary measurable.
“Do not say at a hearing that I knew what they did after I left,” Peter said. “Say I left on this date, I asked for my approval block to be removed, and I objected to treating operations as client consent.”
Musa repeated that back until Peter agreed he had not expanded it.
At the gate, Peter gave him one final direction.
“Do not look for Blue as the name of a contract. Look for Blue as a dispatch instruction.”
Then he repeated it more sharply.
“Blue was not a contract. Blue was an order to move the goods.”