Former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins, who helped design the faulty Horizon software at the centre of the Post Office (PO) Horizon scandal, has claimed the system did a “good job”.
Giving evidence before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on 25 June, Jenkins defended the software, claiming that the Horizon system did a “good job“, and when asked by lawyers if they could argue there was “nothing wrong with Horizon because it simply reflected the information entered onto it”, he replied he believed that to be true at the time.
“I stand by that today as well,” he added.
The inquiry also heard that, in an email from 2001, Jenkins said some bugs could be “lived with” and “some were fixed” at a later date.
Later in the inquiry, Jenkins apologised to Seema Misra, a subpostmaster who was wrongly convicted and sent to prison while eight weeks pregnant.
Misra was found guilty of theft and false accounting, while Jenkins stood as a witness at her trial and failed to tell the court about a bug in the software which could have undermined the case against her. However, he insisted that he did not lie in his evidence.
“The idea that I would lie about Horizon, knowing that an innocent person could be convicted and imprisoned, is completely abhorrent to me,” he said.
Misra told the BBC she doesn’t accept the apology, adding that it is “too little too late”, and asked “why on earth he did what he did”.
PO data leak
The news follows the Post Office accidentally leaking the names and addresses of 555 subpostmasters, who sued after being accused of theft, in an apparent data breach.
The leaked document, which was understood to have shown the details of those involved in suing the PO in 2019, included postcodes, and was on the website in full on Wednesday but later taken down, it was reported. It was entitled ‘Confidential Settlement Deed’ and stated that the contents were private, said the Daily Mail.
A PO representative said: “The document in question has been removed from our website. We are investigating as an urgent priority how it came to be published. We are in the process of notifying the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of the incident, in line with our regulatory requirements.”
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