Fujitsu’s admission that it has “a moral obligation” to pay redress to victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal has arrived very late in the day. The obligation was surely created on the day in November 2019 that the high court ruled that “bugs, errors and defects” in the company’s Horizon system meant there was a “material risk” that faulty data was used in the prosecution of post office operators.
To state the obvious, it should not have taken ITV’s dramatisation of the scandal, and the appearance in front of MPs of the current head of European operations, Paul Patterson, to produce Tuesday’s corporate acceptance that Fujitsu will have to cough up something. The firm’s previous silence, even as the Post Office and ministers were forced to accept reality, has been deafening.
