EX-FUJITSU ENGINEER ADMITS CHANGING COURT TESTIMONY – Post Office requested him to change his testimony
A former IT engineer Gareth Jenkins has admitted he changed crucial expert court testimony at the request of the Post Office during wrongful prosecutions of branch operators.
Gareth Jenkins, a former senior engineer at the contractor Fujitsu, on Tuesday, told the public inquiry into one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history that lawyers had asked him to change witness statements.
Jenkins, who was facing the first of four days of questioning at the judge-led hearings in London, also claimed that the Horizon IT software was “in general … working well”, despite its central role in the scandal.
The state-owned body wrongfully prosecuted 900 post office operators based on alleged financial shortfalls in the accounts of their branches. However, many of those shortfalls were caused by bugs and errors in the Horizon system that operators were forced to use.
Fujitsu designed and built the Horizon system. The twice-postponed questioning of Jenkins, who was honoured as a “distinguished engineer” by the Japanese-owned company, will run for longer than any other witness during the inquiry.
Jenkins is part of a Metropolitan police investigation into possible perjury and perverting the course of justice. Before his testimony, Jenkins was reminded of his privilege against self-incrimination by the judge leading the inquiry, Wyn Williams.
The inquiry is in part examining whether the Post Office and contractors knew about the existence of bugs before deciding to go ahead with the prosecutions, and whether they covered up vital evidence about Horizon during those prosecutions.
However, he also stood by the Horizon system, arguing that it was working well “most of the time”. He did not agree with a 2019 high court judgment that found Horizon was not robust and was at fault in the many prosecutions that followed, changing the lives of those involved forever.