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Former Fujitsu Engineer Apologizes for Role in Post Office IT Scandal

The Digital Artisan

Jun 28, 2024 — 1 min read

Technical Evidence Leading to Wrongful Convictions

Gareth Jenkins, a former distinguished engineer at Fujitsu Services Ltd, confessed to providing incomplete technical evidence leading to the wrongful conviction of numerous Post Office workers in the UK's massive IT scandal. While Jenkins stressed it was unintentional, he publicly apologized during the ongoing inquiry into the Post Office Horizon system. The Horizon system is a finance platform used across thousands of UK Post Office branches which were linked to fraudulent activities due to its internal errors.

System Errors Leading to Injustices

From 1999 to 2015, the errors in the Horizon system led to wrongful convictions of 736 local branch managers for fraud. Jenkins appeared as an expert witness in 15 of these cases, including that of Seema Misra who was falsely charged with theft and false accounting, leading to her imprisonment during her early pregnancy. Her conviction was eventually overturned in 2021.

Apologies Amidst Denials

Jenkins denied accusations of manipulating his evidence to protect the Horizon system, even though he admitted that he played a part in the unfortunate saga. He expressed regret over Misra's plight but shifted partial blame to system creators for maintaining poor coding practices in the platform.

Questionable Code and Responsibility

Despite inheriting the responsibility of the EPOS code - part of the problematic Horizon system - around 2004-2005, Jenkins claimed ignorance of these early coding problems. He inferred that these had been an issue predating his stewardship of the platform.

Post Office’s Repeated sabotage

The Post Office has also been accused of deliberately obstructing the work of independent investigators examining the Horizon IT system’s glitches. The forensic accountant Ian Henderson alleged that the Post Office had unjustifiably withheld crucial documents during the investigation.

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