Horizon scandal: Former Fujitsu engineer says Post Office ‘tried to put words in my mouth’
Mr Jenkins maintains he was not aware of bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system, ITV News' Correspondent John Ray reports.
Gareth Jenkins, the architect of the Horizon software, has claimed the Post Office were “trying to put words into my mouth” when disclosing issues with the IT system.
He said he thought the system was "working well" but added he “would have done things differently” as a court witness for the Post Office in prosecutions against sub-postmasters.
The faulty Horizon system has been the subject of scrutiny across the past decade, after it led to the wrongful prosecutions of over 900 sub-postmasters.
On Tuesday, Mr Jenkins began giving evidence in the first of four days of hearings - the longest any witness has been questioned.
Mr Jenkins was an employee of Fujitsu - previously known as International Computers Ltd before 2002 - for the entirety of his career, until he retired in 2015.
He was part of the team that designed the Horizon system and went on to be a key defender of the software in criminal and civil cases against sub-postmasters - including in the case of Seema Misra, who received a 15-month prison sentence while eight weeks pregnant in November 2010.
Previous witnesses to the inquiry have claimed Mr Jenkins may have committed perjury due to his failure to disclose knowledge of bugs in the Horizon system to the subpostmasters.
In his third witness statement for the inquiry, Mr Jenkins made personal written apologies to some of the subpostmasters and said he was “truly sorry” for Mrs Misra’s wrongful conviction.
He said he feels “deeply affected” by the part he played in all of the cases.
“I have apologised to those individuals who were wrongly convicted in the case studies I have addressed and I repeat again how sorry I am.”
One witness who gave evidence at the inquiry previously described him as the "main architect" of the Horizon software.
On Tuesday, he was asked: “Were you the chief architect of Horizon?”
Mr Jenkins denied that was the case.
But when asked who was, if not him, Mr Jenkins said: “Alan Ward was at that time, and I know he was quite involved in the development of EPOSS [the Electronic Point of Sale Service] because there were quite a lot of changes being made and he used to regularly fly off to Boston for a couple of days almost a week to actually work.”
He maintains he was not aware of bugs, errors and defects in the system.
Lead counsel Jason Beer probed Mr Jenkins on his involvement and whether he believed the system to be working. “Most of the time,” Mr Jenkins responded.
“There were clearly problems during the pilots in both cases and there were clearly individual problems that affected individual branches - and I’m sure we’ll come onto those in some time - but in general I thought the system was working well.”
More than 700 subpostmasters were handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 when errors in the Post Office’s Horizon IT system meant money appeared to be missing from many branch accounts when, in fact, it was not.
It has been branded the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
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