Fujitsu Japan continues to bail out UK arm, with an £80m cash injection taking the total transferred to £360m since 2024, when details of its Post Office scandal role became widely known.
As Computer Weekly revealed in 2024, Fujitsu UK received £200m in April that year, which a senior executive told staff was to address some financial indicators, which could have prevented it from bidding for UK public sector work. In the same month in 2025, it received a further £80m, and this week, the same amount was injected into the UK business by the Japanese giant.
The latest payment, on 31 March, comes as the company tells staff that nearly 10% of its UK workers will be made redundant and while the government waits to hear what Fujitsu’s payment towards the cost of the Post Office scandal, which it fuelled, will be.
In an announcement of a voluntary redundancy programme, which aims to cut 425 jobs, Fujitsu’s UK head, Anwen Owen, said: “We are taking this step at the beginning of our transformation journey so that we can continue to invest in the areas of our business that our customers need most, to build a simpler, more reliant company, and to be best placed for long-term strength.”
A Fujitsu spokesperson said: “The £80m recapitalisation demonstrates Fujitsu Group’s long-term commitment to the UK and will strengthen [the UK] balance sheet. It follows similar payments in 2024 and 2025. This is part of a regular corporate review process covering all legal entities in the Fujitsu group. It is unrelated to our ongoing conversations with government regarding contribution to compensation.”
One source in the IT services sector told Computer Weekly: “£360m injected by Japan over the last three years, contracts lost, bidding paused, redundancies ongoing, legal action underway and a thin pipeline that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, with a parent guarantee needed just to get the accounts signed. At some point you have to call it what it is, a sustained leadership failure in a business that did not need to end up here.”
Since the broadcast of ITV’s dramatisation of the Post Office scandal, Fujitsu has faced pressure from the public and politicians.
The human cost of the scandal is not measurable, but the financial cost is. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been spent on lawyers and compensation for victims, as well as a public inquiry and a nationwide police investigation.
According to the latest government data, it has so far paid about £1.4bn to over 10,600 claimants who suffered at the hands of the Horizon system’s errors in the Post Office Horizon system from Fujitsu.
Legal costs for the Post Office and government associated with the Post Office scandal run into several hundred million pounds.
Meanwhile, the statutory public inquiry into the scandal has so far cost about £50m, while the nationwide police investigation into the Post Office scandal, Operation Olympos, is expected to cost over £50m.
Then, there has been billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on replacing Fujitsu’s controversial Horizon system. Hundreds of millions of pounds were wasted on failed attempts as the Post Office, under huge public and government pressure, rushed into projects before the current plan was in place.
Due to delays replacing the Horizon system, Fujitsu has continued to win contracts with the Post Office, also worth hundreds of millions of pounds. It will not be out of contract with the Post Office until the summer of next year, and only if the current replacement project goes to plan.
However, despite its huge public sector earnings, Fujitsu is yet to declare how much it will contribute to the overall costs of a scandal it enabled. The supplier backed the Post Office for nearly two decades when it claimed that errors in the horizon system could not cause the unexplained accounting shortfalls subpostmasters were blamed and punished for.
In October 2025, campaigning peer James Arbuthnot demanded Fujitsu pay £700m in the interim. “Fujitsu has caused great harm to thousands of people and should pay a great amount to compensate for this,” he said. Following teh latest payment from headquarters in Japan he said: “Fujitsu’s approach to the Horizon scandal is short sighted and uncommercial as well as lacking in honour. If they had contributed a substantial interim payment they would not have become the pariahs of the technical world, and would be able now to generate a better income and not need to be propped up by their Japanese head office, which must be beginning to wonder about the damage its UK office is doing to its brand.”
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
