Cameroon timber Japan’s Fujitsu ‘morally obligated’ to compensate wronged UK postmasters says company’s European head during inquiry
Fujitsu has a moral obligation to help compensate UK postmasters wrongly convicted because of a bug in its accounting software, its European director said on Tuesday.
Paul Patterson, apologised to those affected by the glitches in its Horizon system that saw some 700 local post office managers accused of theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2005.
Some were jailed, others went bankrupt and lost their homes or their health, while four people took their own lives and dozens since exonerated died without seeing their names cleared.
“Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice,” Patterson, who joined the company in 2019, told lawmakers probing the scandal, which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice.
I am personally appalled by the evidence that I have seen and what I saw on the television drama. We have a moral obligation Paul Patterson, Fujitsu’s European director “We were involved from the very start. We did have bugs and errors in the system, and we did help the post office in their prosecutions of the sub-postmasters. For that we are truly sorry.”
Patterson told a parliamentary committee that Fujitsu, which assisted the Post Office in prosecutions using flawed data from the software, had a moral obligation to redress the “travesty”.
“I am personally appalled by the evidence that I have seen and what I saw on the television drama,” he said.
“We have a moral obligation.
“We also expect to sit down with government to determine our contribution to that redress.”
Post Office CEO Nick Read and Fujitsu Services Ltd Director Paul Patterson give evidence to a hearing of the Business and Trade Select Committee in the House of Commons, in London, on Tuesday. Photo: PRU/AFP Fujitsu – which has headquarters in Tokyo – is one of the world’s largest IT services providers, with annual revenues of around US$27 billion.
It provides IT services to multiple UK government departments including the interior, foreign, and environment ministries.
The UK government has warned Fujitsu that it will be “held to account” if a public inquiry finds it guilty of wrongdoing, and has set aside £1 billion (US$1.3 billion) in compensation for thousands affected in the case.
The long-running saga has hit headlines since the broadcast of a television drama about the sub-postmasters’ ordeal, generating a wave of sympathy and outrage.
A public inquiry into the scandal at the state-owned institution, which has more than 11,500 branches, is ongoing.
Police probe Britain’s Post Office for accusing over 700 employees of theft
The Post Office’s current boss, Nick Read, told the hearing that during the scandal, prosecutions were running at 55-75 a year.
“It is an absolutely extraordinary number,” he said, adding that a lack of curiosity within the Post Office to ask “Why is this the case, what is going on?” remained a mystery.
Some MPs want billions of dollars of government contracts with Fujitsu to be re-examined in the light of the scandal.
But Post Office’s chief executive Read told the lawmakers the scandal was “an extremely complex situation”.
He said he wanted the inquiry to be given “every opportunity” to understand “what exactly happened, who was accountable” and what to do next.
More than 700 post office branch managers were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 after faulty Horizon accounting software wrongly showed money was missing from their shops. Photo: EPA-EFE His predecessor Paula Vennells gave up her CBE honour last week after a British television drama about the scandal ignited public fury.
Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster featured in ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, said victims had waited “far too long” for redress.
“People are suffering, they are dying, we’re losing numbers along the way,” he told the lawmakers.
Jo Hamilton, a sub-postmistress and one of the victims who was also featured in the drama, said the plan to mass exonerate those convicted was not perfect, but it was the only way to speed up a resolution.
She said the new knowledge that money she was forced to pay back to the Post Office had swollen its profits, leading to executive bonuses, was “sickening”.
“We were shouting so loud at one point and everything was known and yet our money was just being played with.”