Ex-Fujitsu employees to testify in Post Office IT scandal inquiry

Police investigating for perjury

Two former Fujitsu employees, Anne Chambers and Gareth Jenkins, who are currently being investigated by police for alleged perjury in the Post Office Horizon scandal, will testify in the coming months.

The latest inquiry schedule shows that the two ex-Fujitsu employees will appear in front of Wyn Williams, head of the investigation, during the first week of May.

The Metropolitan Police is looking into the duo for possible perjury after they were used as expert witnesses in subpostmasters' prosecutions, ComputerWeekly has found.

Fujitsu, a Japanese company, is at the centre of the Post Office's IT scandal. Over 700 Post Office branch managers were convicted of fraud, after defective accounting software made it look like public money had gone missing from their branches.

Fujitsu created that particular piece of software, named Horizon. The Post Office has used it since 1999 to record transactions carried out across different branches.

The system's primary objective was to automate manual tasks, but technological flaws meant hundreds of people were wrongly accused of fraud.

Dozens of subpostmasters were imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, while hundreds were asked to pay back their own money for unexplained accounting shortfalls. They have told stories of financial ruin and being shunned by their communities. Some have now passed away.

The case turned into a political issue in 2009, when reports emerged that glitches with Horizon computer system were at fault, rather than the subpostmasters.

In 2019, a group litigation action brought by the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, a campaign group of 555 subpostmasters, ended after the Post Office admitted its computer system was at fault.

Evidence showed that Fujitsu and Post Office employees were aware of computer issues but failed to disclose them during the subpostmasters' trial.

In the last three years criminal convictions for more than 80 people have been reversed.

Before issuing a decision in the High Court in December 2019, Judge Peter Fraser said he was forwarding information to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) due to concerns about the accuracy of testimony produced in court by Fujitsu in earlier prosecutions of subpostmasters.

The DPP directed Fraser's concerns to the Metropolitan Police in January 2020. The Met launched a criminal inquiry against Chambers and Jenkins in November 2020.

Since then the police have spoken with the ex-Fujitsu employees several times.

At a hearing in phase two of the inquiry in November last year, John Simpkin, Horizon system software support centre team leader at Fujitsu, who worked with Anne Chambers, said she was "very unhappy" about being "manoeuvred" into providing testimony.

The statutory public investigation, now in its third phase, is looking into how the Horizon system operates, including training, assistance, dispute resolution, knowledge and system fault correction.

Both former Fujitsu employees appeared in phase two of the investigation, but did not testify. The second phase of the investigation looked at the procurement, design, pilot, roll-out and changes to the Horizon system.