Lawyers acting for victims of Horizon IT scandal accuse Gareth Jenkins of protecting ‘out of control monster’

A former Fujitsu engineer has been accused by a lawyer acting for victims of the Post Office scandal of “hiding” problems with the Horizon IT system to protect the “out of control monster”, a public inquiry heard.

Gareth Jenkins, formerly a senior engineer at Fujitsu, which developed the Horizon IT system, faced tough questioning by lawyers acting for post office operators caught up in the scandal, which has been described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent history.

Gareth Jenkins says past accusation against high-profile victim of Horizon IT scandal was ‘totally inappropriate’

A former Fujitsu engineer has apologised for emails in which he accused Seema Misra, a high-profile victim of the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal, of “jumping on the bandwagon” in questioning the reliability of the organisation’s computer system.

Gareth Jenkins, a former senior engineer at Fujitsu, which developed the Horizon system, was giving evidence for a third day to a public inquiry examining why the Post Office wrongly prosecuted hundreds of branch operators for financial discrepancies before it emerged that the system was unreliable.

Gareth Jenkins tells Post Office inquiry he only realised in 2018 that this was happening in practice

A former engineer for the company responsible for developing the Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system has said he knew the computer system could in theory be accessed remotely by its staff for nearly two decades before realising it was happening in practice.

The former Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins was giving his second day of evidence to the Post Office inquiry which is looking at why the state-owned institution prosecuted 900 operatives on the basis of alleged financial shortfalls in their branches when many of the discrepancies were caused by bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon IT system.