A senior Fujitsu engineer made a false statement to court about the flawed Post Office IT system, contradicting a report he had written days earlier.
The BBC has obtained Gareth Jenkins’ 2010 statement, which helped wrongly jail pregnant postmistress Seema Misra. It said there were “no cases” where branch accounts could be altered without postmasters’ knowledge. But he had just produced a Post Office report which proposed remotely altering data in branches to fix a bug.
Mr Jenkins, Fujitsu’s former chief IT architect, is currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police for potential perjury, the BBC understands. At least three Post Office lawyers were told about the internal report which contradicted Mr Jenkins’ statement to court, but his report was not disclosed at the trial of Mrs Misra – who had been running a branch at West Byfleet in Surrey.
The Post Office said it was “deeply sorry” for the suffering caused to victims and it “remained focused” on supporting the ongoing inquiry.
Mr Jenkins’ report and an accompanying memo provide the clearest evidence yet that as early as autumn 2010 the Post Office and Fujitsu, which built the Horizon IT system, were aware of details about the software which could cast doubt on prosecutions, and were keeping them hidden.
The memo, which summarised a series of meetings about the report, said that if the bug was widely known, it could cause a “loss of confidence in the Horizon system”, provide branches with “ammunition to blame Horizon for future discrepancies” and have “potential impact upon ongoing legal cases”The Horizon bug, known internally as the “receipts/payments mismatch” issue, was causing discrepancies between the accounts postmasters saw and those on the Post Office main servers. According to the memo, it was known to be affecting 40 branches.
In his report on 29 September 2010, Gareth Jenkins suggested remotely altering data to resolve the bug.
He met other Fujitsu and Post Office representatives a few days later to discuss the possible solutions.
The memo says Mr Jenkins’ proposal to remotely access sub-postmasters’ accounts had raised “significant data integrity concerns”, could lead to questions of “tampering” and could prompt “moral implications” of the Post Office “changing branch data without informing the branch”.In the end, the group chose a different solution – using debt recovery or refunds to make the balances match. The memo acknowledged this could “potentially highlight to branches that Horizon can lose data”.
Nine days after delivering his report, Mr Jenkins submitted his final expert witness testimony, which was used by the prosecution in Mrs Misra’s trial. In the months leading up to it, he had been drafting his statement for the court, with input from Post Office lawyers.
Mr Jenkins’ testimony was also later used in the prosecution of many other sub-postmasters, where details of his report on the bug were again not disclosed.
The BBC has obtained his 2010 testimony, which states there are “no cases where external systems can manipulate the branch’s accounts without the users in the branch being aware and authorising the transactions”.
On the same day, 8 October, internal documents show that a number of Post Office lawyers had copies of both Mr Jenkins’ contradictory claims – his witness statement, and the report about the bug in which he proposed remotely altering branch data.
.Source: BBC
