Fujitsu sponsored an annual event held by the National Federation of Subpostmasters (NFSP) just months before a High Court trial examined claims that its system wrecked the lives of subpostmasters.
A document about the annual NFSP conference, which was held in Nottingham in February 2018, stated that Fujitsu was sponsoring an evening event during the conference.
The NFSP failed to support subpostmasters and defended the Fujitsu system during the legal battle, which began later that year.
When the conference was held, the High Court battle was approaching. Planning for legal action by affected subpostmasters began in 2015. In January 2017, the group litigation order (GLO) was given the go-ahead, and it began in November 2018.
The court case saw subpostmasters try to prove, against huge financial odds, that the Fujitsu Horizon system used in Post Office branches was responsible for unexplained accounting shortfalls that they had been blamed for. Many were prosecuted and wrongly convicted of financial crimes as a result, in what is today widely known as the Post Office Horizon scandal.
The NFSP did not support the action brought by Sir Alan Bates and 554 other claimants, and did not endorse the claims against Fujitsu’s system. The organisation has been accused of taking the Post Office’s side as a result of its financial reliance on it.
GLO managing judge Peter Fraser said in his judgment: “The NFSP is not remotely independent of the Post Office, nor does it appear to put its members’ interests above its own separate commercial interests.”
The 2018 annual conference itinerary document reveals the NFSP was accepting sponsorship from Fujitsu.
Subpostmasters won the court case, which ended in December 2019. That victory paved the way for wrongful convictions to be overturned, the statutory public inquiry and the ITV drama that widened public awareness of the Post Office scandal.
The NFSP later said it had been misled by the Post Office about the robustness of Fujitsu’s Horizon system.
But as recently as last year, George Thomson, NFSP general secretary from 2007 to 2018, told the Post Office Horizon scandal statutory public inquiry that the Horizon system was robust while he headed up the organisation. In his witness statement, he wrote: “The sheer volume of transactions against the small percentage of claims proves beyond any doubt that the system was robust.”
This is despite subpostmasters contacting him directly on numerous occasions to explain the difficulties they were having with the system, and the landmark High Court judgment in 2019 that found the Horizon system was not robust.
The NFSP was unavailable for comment when this article was published, but speaking following Thomson’s evidence last year, current NFSP CEO Calum Greenhow said: “The NFSP of today was shocked by the evidence given by Thomson at the inquiry. This is especially so given the number of people who suffered as a result of the Horizon scandal, and the clear evidence at the inquiry which shows that Horizon was not ‘robust’.
“It is clear that more could and should have been done for them and for others. Sadly, due to Mr Thomson’s position on Horizon during his time as general secretary, this did not happen, and for that we are truly sorry.”
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, when it revealed the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).
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