Japan’s Fujitsu ‘morally obligated’ to compensate wronged UK postmasters says company’s European head during inquiry

The company’s European director apologised to those affected by the glitches in its Horizon system that saw some 700 local post office managers accused of theft

Paul Patterson said Fujitsu, which assisted the Post Office in prosecutions using flawed data, had a moral obligation to redress the ‘travesty’

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Published: 12:00am, 17 Jan 2024Updated: 2:31am, 17 Jan 2024

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.”

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