The Post Office and Fujitsu agreed a deal 19 years in the past to repair transaction errors in sub-postmasters’ accounts brought on by bugs within the Horizon IT system, a doc has revealed.
An settlement was in place in 2006 for errors brought on by bugs within the software program to be corrected, or for Fujitsu to pay the Post Office as much as £150 per transaction if it failed to take action.
The revelation instantly contradicts the Post Office’s claims throughout legal prosecutions, which led to a whole lot of wrongful convictions and civil circumstances that destroyed livelihoods, that no bugs existed able to inflicting accounting shortfalls.
It additionally exhibits the Post Office knew nearly twenty years in the past that Horizon couldn’t at all times be relied upon to report transactions precisely.
Between 1999 and 2015, greater than 900 sub-postmasters have been wrongly prosecuted after the defective Horizon IT system made it seem like cash was lacking from department accounts.
Some sub-postmasters went to jail, whereas many extra have been financially ruined and misplaced their livelihoods. Others died.
It has been described as the most important miscarriage of justice in British authorized historical past and has led to a long-running public inquiry into the scandal.
Countless proof and testimonies have been heard, examined and reported throughout the inquiry, however a doc which emerged in materials printed this month contained new, beforehand unknown, data.
The doc exhibits that unbeknown to sub-postmasters, the 2 events had a monetary framework in place to handle discrepancies and for Fujitsu to repair issues or pay for them.
The Post Office denied all through the legal trials of sub-postmasters that errors or bugs might trigger transaction shortfalls in department accounts. It additionally denied in court docket that department accounts could possibly be remotely altered with out the data of sub-postmasters.
The doc signifies the formal industrial association was drawn as much as cope with potential mismatches or “discrepancies” and the place Fujitsu’s system was accountable, it was anticipated to right false transactions or pay “liquidation damages”.
The disclosure additionally undermines the Post Office’s declare to the media and earlier than Parliament in 2015 that it was not doable for Fujitsu to change sub-postmasters’s transactions with out their data.
“The Post Office conducted both the criminal trials of postmasters and the group litigation of 2019 on the basis that it knew of no substantial problems with the Horizon system,” stated Paul Marshall, senior barrister for sub-postmasters.
“Yet this shows that in 2006 there was a very big, recognised problem with Horizon maintaining data integrity between Post Office branch offices and Fujitsu,” he added.
“The Post Office, for 20 years, was saying the only explanation for shortfalls in branch accounts was postmaster incompetence or dishonesty.
“But the upkeep of knowledge integrity was elementary to the Post Office-Fujitsu contract – Fujitsu have been unable to supply or guarantee this.”
The document implicitly acknowledges that data held on Horizon’s servers at Fujitsu’s headquarters could fail to match the transactions sub-postmasters had carried out at their branches.
It also adds to evidence that the Post Office was aware that the branch accounts of sub-postmasters could be remotely accessed. In the landmark Alan Bates vs Post Office case, for example, the organisation insisted that the software could not be accessed remotely by any other party.
Under the arrangements set out in the document, Fujitsu agreed to carry out a “reconciliation service” with the Post Office’s approval, where it was required to correct errors caused by bugs or defects or pay up to £150 per transaction in penalties known as “liquidated damages”.
The document is dated four months before the Post Office started legal action against sub-postmaster Lee Castleton OBE pursuing him to recover £25,000 of cash it alleged was missing from his branch in East Yorkshire.
He represented himself in court, arguing that problems with Horizon were to blame, but lost and was landed with £321,000 in legal costs and ended up bankrupt as a result.
Mr Castleton is now suing the Post Office and Fujitsu for damages and said the document would help his battle.
“It’s a disgusting doc. It’s one other instance of the reality being hidden for twenty years. All the ache and punishment the victims have taken all these years and it was buried,” he advised the BBC.
“It makes me really feel bodily sick to assume they have been doing that and never telling anybody…it is time they have been held accountable for all these actions.”
The document, first discovered by Post Office scandal campaigner Stuart Goodwillie, supports what whistleblower Richard Roll told BBC Panorama in 2015.
The former Fujitsu worker said the team working on Horizon would sometimes correct thousands of transactions per night because the firm could be forced to pay cash to the Post Office if it failed to do so.
The agreement also notes that Fujitsu can and will amend transactional data, with the need for the Post Office to approve the entries. A later version of the contract has been found where this stipulation has been changed to “the place that is doable”.
The document is listed in an annexe in two corporate witness statements provided by Fujitsu’s current European chief executive, Paul Patterson, in 2024 but has only recently been published.
The material document has shocked experts on the scandal such as Second Sight forensic accountant Ron Warmington, who described the document’s implications as “dynamite”.
A Fujitsu spokesperson stated: “These issues are the topic of forensic investigation by the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and it isn’t applicable for us to remark whereas that course of is ongoing.”
A Post Office spokesperson said: “We apologise unequivocally for the damage and struggling which Post Office precipitated to so many individuals throughout the Horizon IT Scandal.
“Today, our organisation is focused on working transparently with the ongoing public inquiry, paying full and fair financial redress to those impacted, and establishing a meaningful restorative justice programme, all of which are important elements of the ongoing transformation of Post Office.”
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