Fujitsu has refused to say how much the company will pay towards the mammoth £1.8bn compensation bill for the Post Office scandal, currently being funded by the taxpayer.
A top executive also admitted the company has so far set nothing aside to cover its contribution to those affected by what former prime minister Rishi Sunak described as “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.
Hundreds of subpostmasters were prosecuted for theft and false accounting because of Fujitsu’s faulty computer system, with some victims sent to prison or financially ruined.
Those whose convictions have been quashed are eligible for compensation, but MPs on the Commons business and trade committee heard one subpostmaster had wrongly been told they did not qualify.
Paul Patterson, director at Fujitsu Services Ltd, has previously admitted the firm had “clearly let society down” and that there were “bugs, errors and defects” with its Horizon software that led to financial discrepancies that saw postmasters being wrongfully convicted “right from the very start”.
On Tuesday, he told MPs that the company was committed to contributing to the compensation scheme, but that the amount would be determined only when the firm had seen the results of the official inquiry currently being held into the scandal.
He said that “we will decide [a figure] when we see the report”.
But he was challenged by Lib Dem MP Charlie Maynard, who told him: “This whole problem would not have happened without Fujitsu’s failures”.
He asked him to send a message to Fujitsu’s chair and other executives and ask them to appear before the committee to explain, “if they are not paying £1.8bn in full, why not?”
Mr Patterson was also pressed by the chair of the committee, Labour MP Liam Byrne, who said Fujitsu was still “taking £1m a day from British taxpayers” in various government contracts.
The committee also heard from a former post office manager who had not had her conviction overturned, while her husband had, despite both being prosecuted for the same crime.
Glenys Eaton told MPs that she had to take her case to a judicial review.
She said they had to “employ a barrister to fight our corner. We had to pay £5,000 for his services, but we knew we were in the right and the only way we could get justice was to fight on.” She was told that her conviction would be quashed “only weeks ago”, she said, despite a law designed to overturn wrongful convictions from the IT scandal coming into force in May 2024.
Her lawyer, David Enright, a partner at Howe & Co Solicitors, said the firm had fought a “titanic battle” on her behalf. But he warned: “I am certain there are many Mrs Eatons out there.”
