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A former Fujitsu engineer has insisted the IT system at the centre of the Post Office scandal was robust, despite the High Court finding it was responsible for wrongful prosecutions.
Gareth Jenkins told a public inquiry on Tuesday that while he accepted there were “discrete bugs” in the Horizon system — developed by Fujitsu — that could result in account discrepancies, they were well controlled and managed.
“They could cause discrepancies in branch accounts but not at the sort of levels that have been talked about,” he said. “In general the systems, I believe, were operating as they should.”
The High Court ruled in a landmark case in 2019 that several “bugs, errors and defects” had meant there was a “material risk” that Horizon was to blame for account shortfalls at the centre of Post Office prosecutions.
More than 900 sub-postmasters were convicted in cases involving faulty data from Horizon following its introduction in 1999. More than 100 convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal before legislation was passed this year to exonerate most victims en masse.
In the 2019 High Court ruling, Mr Justice Fraser wrote that legacy Horizon — a system rolled out to branches from 1999 until 2010 — was not “remotely robust”.
Jenkins said the system was not infallible, but there were “mechanisms in place” to monitor bugs and errors in the system. “There were some discrete bugs that caused some problems to the accounts,” he said.
“They were very discrete and I believe they were well controlled and managed at the time,” he added, though he later conceded that he may have been “wrongly confident” that this was the case.
Jenkins joined Fujitsu in 1973 when it was International Computers. He retired in 2015 but was retained on an ad hoc basis by the IT company as a consultant until August 2022.
He was deployed by the state-owned Post Office as a witness in the prosecution of Seema Misra, a sub-postmaster who was sentenced in 2010 to 15 months in prison for theft while eight weeks pregnant. Misra’s conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in 2021.
Barrister Simon Clarke in 2013 told the Post Office that Jenkins had failed to disclose information in Misra’s case in “plain breach of his duty as an expert witness”.
Clarke advised that Jenkins should not be used to provide evidence in any “current or future prosecution”.
Jenkins wrote in his witness statement to the inquiry that he was not aware of Clarke’s guidance. “This advice was highly critical of me and has had far-reaching consequences,” he said.
Jenkins told the inquiry that the Post Office’s lawyers had attempted to “put words in my mouth” and said he was aware officials had rephrased his evidence to be more unequivocal about the robustness of Horizon.
He added lawyers did not properly brief him that he was an “expert witness” in the Misra trial — a role that required him to set out any adverse findings — instead he presented a narrow set of evidence. “No one told me I needed to do more than that,” he said.
The former Fujitsu engineer also assisted the Post Office in the 2019 High Court case.
The Metropolitan Police has interviewed Jenkins under caution in relation to allegations of perjury and perverting the course of justice following evidence he provided as a witness in Post Office prosecutions. Jenkins has not been arrested or charged with any offence.
