Fujitsu should pay for the Post Office scandal

Let’s talk about Fujitsu. In particular, let’s ask why the Japanese multinational IT supplier has not been taken to court, or heavily fined, or barred from bidding for new public-sector contracts, for the faults of its Horizon sub-post-office system and the mishandling of pleas for help from hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted. Public reaction to the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office has provoked the former Post Office chief Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE, but whatever she did wrong, she wasn’t the root cause of the scandal. So let’s take a closer look at the maker of the kit that failed.

Fujitsu built Japan’s first computers in the mid-1950s. But the DNA of its UK operations makes it more than just another foreign tech supplier, to be compared with China’s sinister Huawei. In 1998 Fujitsu acquired a very British subsidiary, ICL, the ‘national champion’ for the computer sector formed by a multiple merger in 1968 (driven by Tony Benn as Labour’s minister of technology) to compete against IBM and Hewlett-Packard of the US.