Ex-Fujitsu engineer denies hiding Horizon issues at trial which put pregnant sub-postmaster in jail
A former senior Fujitsu engineer denied hiding problems with Horizon, during a trial which wrongly led to a pregnant sub-postmaster being jailed, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry heard.
Gareth Jenkins' evidence about the computer system was used in the prosecutions of many sub-postmasters, including Seema Misra, who was eight weeks pregnant when she was handed a 15-month prison sentence in November 2010.
Flora Page, representing a number of sub-postmasters, described Horizon as an “out of control monster” by the time of Ms Misra’s trial.
She told the inquiry, on its final day, that “hundreds of people had already had their lives ruined to protect it”.
Previous witnesses to the inquiry claimed Mr Jenkins may have committed perjury due to his failure to disclose knowledge of bugs in the Horizon system to the sub-postmasters.
He is currently the subject of a Metropolitan Police investigation on suspicion of perjury and perverting the course of justice.
Quizzing Mr Jenkins, Ms Page said: “Isn’t it the truth that you knew Horizon was a monster and it was causing harm?”
He replied: “No, that’s not how I felt.”
Ms Page put to Mr Jenkins that he “threw mud in the jury’s eyes”, to which he said: “I did not.”
She put it to Mr Jenkins that failing to tell the court that he knew that transactions were being injected at the counter was failing to tell the whole truth.
He said: “I didn’t think that at the time.”
It was put to him that there were “thousands of known error log entries”, and Mr Jenkins said: “I’m not sure how many known error log entries there were, I don’t know the volumes.”
During his evidence, Mr Jenkins said: “I am sorry [about] what happened to Ms Misra but I feel that was due to the way that Post Office had behaved and wasn’t purely down to me.
“I clearly got trapped into doing things I should not have done but that was not intentional on my part.”
On Thursday, Mr Jenkins said he “felt happy” at the time with evidence he gave as part of Ms Misra’s trial.
More than 700 sub-postmasters 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.
Mr Jenkins has given evidence for four consecutive days up to Friday, the longest run of questions any witness has faced so far.
The inquiry continues.
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