Fujitsu’s European boss has told MPs the company is “not a parasite”, after being criticised for continuing to make hundreds of millions of pounds from UK government contracts while refusing to give a compensation figure for victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
Two years ago Paul Patterson said Fujitsu had a “moral obligation” to pay financial redress to the victims of Horizon – admitting it had known the accounting IT system was faulty since the 1990s – with the government estimating the final cost to taxpayers of payouts to be £1.8bn.
On Tuesday, Patterson was taken to task by the Commons business and trade committee for Fujitsu’s continued refusal to reveal a compensation figure or make a provision for it in the publicly listed Japanese company’s financial accounts.
Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and the chair of the committee, accused Fujitsu of “behaving like a parasite on the British state” for continuing to make millions from government IT contracts while refusing to commit to a Horizon financial redress figure.
The scandal, in which more than 1,000 people were wrongly legally pursued over discrepancies in their post office branch accounts linked to faulty software developed by Fujitsu, has been labelled the worst miscarriage of justice in UK history.
Patterson told the select committee on Tuesday that Fujitsu UK has contracts with the government, including to keep running the ageing Horizon system for the Post Office, worth about £500m if they are not terminated early.
In January 2023, Fujitsu voluntarily informed the Cabinet Office that it would not bid for new UK public contracts pending the publication of the final report of the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal, which is expected later this year.
“We are not a parasite, chair,” Patterson said to Byrne. “We have not bid for new government business. The government has the option of whether it wants to extend those contracts or not.
“If you wish us to walk away from those contracts, we will walk away. I think that [would] be detrimental to society and to the UK government. The government and the Post Office asked us to extend the Post Office contract. We don’t want to do that. We are doing it because the government has asked us to do that. We are not parasitic at all.”
Patterson said he stood by his previous comments that Fujitsu has a “moral obligation” to offer a level of financial redress for its role in the scandal. Its involvement included providing data used by the Post Office in prosecutions of branch owner-operators and the fact its employees could remotely access and change Horizon data.
He said the company would work out the level of financial redress due to victims when the inquiry led by Sir Wyn Williams publishes the final part of a series of reports.
To date, Williams has only published the first volume of findings from his two-year inquiry, last July, which revealed that the scandal may have led to more than 13 suicides.
“When we last spoke I agreed with you on the moral obligation topic,” Patterson said. “I have maintained that position over the last two years since I saw you.
“We need to be informed by Sir Wyn’s report. We want to see that report. The quantum we will decide when we get to the final report. We were involved from the very start, [Horizon] did have bugs and errors in systems and [we] did help the Post Office in the prosecutions of the subpostmasters.”
The latest UK government figures show that £1.32bn has so far been paid out to more than 10,000 claimants.
