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.

Richard Christou tells public inquiry that real failure in Post Office scandal was the way prosecutions had been handled

A former executive of Fujitsu, the company that developed the Post Office’s Horizon IT system, has told a public inquiry he felt “aggrieved” that what he thought was a “good system” had been placed into such disrepute by the scandal, and said he believed that the “real issue” was the way criminal prosecutions of post office operators had been handled by the state-owned body.

Richard Christou, the former chief executive and executive chairman of Fujitsu Services Holdings, was testifying at the inquiry, which is examining why the Post Office prosecuted and ruined hundreds of people, alleging financial shortfalls in their post office branch accounts. Despite campaigns, it took years for the Post Office to admit that faults with Horizon were behind many of the shortfalls.