Fujitsu has admitted it has a moral duty to pay up for the hundreds of postmasters it helped to convict on false charges because of its dodgy software.
The postmasters were the victims of the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history. It saw some 700 local post office bosses branded as crooks and sent to prison or left penniless.
Some even killed themselves or died before they could clear their names after being accused of theft and fraud based on faulty data from Fujitsu’s Horizon system between 1999 and 2005.
“Fujitsu would like to apologise for our part in this horrific scandal,” Patterson, who joined the firm in 2019, told MPs investigating the outrage, which has sparked fury across the nation.
The Japanese IT giant’s boss, Paul Patterson, said sorry to the victims and said Fujitsu had a duty to pay out.
“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 witch-hunt of the subpostmasters. For that we are truly sorry.”
The shocking saga has hit the headlines since the broadcast of a TV drama about the subpostmasters’ nightmare, which moved millions of viewers.
Patterson told a parliamentary committee that Fujitsu, which backed the Post Office in court using dodgy data from the software, had a moral duty to make up for the “disaster”.
“I am personally appalled by the evidence that I have seen and what I saw on the TV drama We have a moral duty. We also expect to sit down with the government to work out how much we owe,” he said.
Fujitsu – which is based in Tokyo – is one of the world’s biggest IT firms, with annual revenues of around $27 billion.
It provides IT services to many UK government departments including the home, foreign, and environment offices.
The UK government has warned Fujitsu that it will be “punished” if a public inquiry finds it guilty of wrongdoing, and has set aside £1 billion in compensation for thousands affected by the case.
Some MPs want billions of pounds of government contracts with Fujitsu to be cancelled in the light of the scandal.
But Post Office’s chief executive Nick Read told the MPs the scandal was “a very complicated mess”.
He said he wanted the inquiry to be given “every chance” to find out “what exactly happened, who was responsible” and what to do next.
In Scotland, which has a different legal system to England and Wales, the Scottish government’s top lawyer said sorry for the “injustices” caused by the scandal.
Dorothy Bain told the Scottish Parliament that prosecutors had taken evidence from the Post Office at “face value”.
She said 73 people who may have been wrongly convicted in Scotland because of “unreliable evidence” from the Horizon system had been contacted for their case to be reviewed.
So far, she said, there had been seven cases sent back to court, four of which have resulted in convictions being quashed.
