MPs: Let's make Fujitsu pay up to protect taxpayer from footing bill

COMPUTER giant Fujitsu could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds for its role in the Post Office scandal after ministers insisted taxpayers should not be “left with the tab”.

- Jonathan Walker and David Williamson

MPs are also demanding that the firm be banned from bidding for lucrative public sector contracts.

More than £148million has been paid to 2,700 victims of the Horizon IT scandal, with hundreds of others still to receive compensation.

But Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake said: “The taxpayer shouldn’t be left with the tab for this scandal so I will be looking at the extent of any other organisation’s culpability.”

Writing in the Sunday Express, Mr Hollinrake described the scandal as “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in history” and urged those wrongfully convicted to take legal action.

It follows warnings that making the publicly owned Post Office pay compensation is effectively a charge on taxpayers.

Fujitsu provided the Horizon accounting system installed in 11,500 branches.

It was eventually proved to be faulty but only after the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses for supposed crimes such as false accounting.

Liam Byrne, chairman of the House of Commons Business Committee, which will this week interrogate Fujitsu and Post Office bosses, said: “Fujitsu is reported to have known there was something fundamentally flawed with the system.

“What moral obligation do they feel to contribute royally to the hundreds of millions of pounds of compensation that must now be paid to the innocent?”