'At least 70' people in Post Office and Royal Mail knew of Horizon flaws, inquiry told
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At least 70 people within the Post Office and Royal Mail knew of errors with the Horizon IT system, according to its manufacturer. Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted on the basis of accounting errors produced by the Horizon system. The barrister for Horizon manufacturer Fujitsu told the inquiry into IT and Post Office failures it had identified a list of people who knew of bugs, errors and defects within the computer program.
These individuals were senior in the organisation, including Post Office board members, senior executives, in-house lawyers, and staff in the security and investigations teams, said counsel for Fujitsu Richard Whittam. The inquiry received "unequivocal evidence" of these individuals' knowledge of the Horizon flaws, he added.
It was these flaws that generated imagined financial shortfalls in Post Office branches which were used by the organisation to bring private prosecutions against more than 700 people for theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2015. Others were bankrupted, lost homes, were isolated from and left communities, suffered ill health and relationship breakdown, and some died by suicide as a result of having to pay back money they never owed.
The scandal has been described as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent British legal history. Follow our channel and never miss an update. 'Not the fault of technology'. In concluding Fujitsu's evidence to the inquiry, Mr Whittam said the Post Office knew of the flaws 25 years ago, and it was not fundamentally the fault of Horizon but of corporate wrongdoing.
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