Post Office Inquiry: Ex-Fujitsu engineer denies ‘protecting the monster’
An expert on the Post Office Horizon IT systems has denied suggestions he was “protecting the monster” in evidence he gave to the trial of a sub-postmaster who was wrongly convicted while pregnant.
Former senior Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins told the Post Office Inquiry he did not hide glitches in the branch accounting system at the trial of Seema Misra in 2010 – widely seen as a crucial test case at the time.
Mrs Misra was jailed for 15 months on the back of his evidence as an expert witness.
On his fourth day in the witness box at the inquiry, Mr Jenkins insisted he was telling the truth about what he knew of Horizon glitches in answers to questions on the scandal from her lawyer Flora Page.
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Ms Page described Horizon as an “out of control monster” by the time of her client’s trial and added that “hundreds of people had already had their lives ruined to protect it”.
She put it to Mr Jenkins: “Isn’t the truth that you knew Horizon was a monster and it was causing harm?”
He replied: “No, that’s not how I felt.”
Ms Page put to Mr Jenkins that he “threw mud in the jury’s eyes”, to which he said: “I did not.”
She put it to Mr Jenkins that failing to tell the court that he knew that transactions were being injected at the counter was failing to tell the whole truth.
He said: “I didn’t think that at the time.”
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Former engineer defends Horizon system
It was put to him that there were “thousands of known error log entries”, and Mr Jenkins said: “I’m not sure how many known error log entries there were, I don’t know the volumes.”
Ms Page said that during the trial Mr Jenkins was asked if he knew whether there were any problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu was aware of, and put it to him that the truthful answer would have been “cash accounts, remote access, tampering, bad error handling, silent faults across the system, the EPOSS code, the terrible code, hardware failures, persistent hardware failures, recovering transactions that were lost”.
Mr Jenkins replied: “That was not how I understood the question to be.”
“You hid all these issues and problems when you gave evidence against Seema Misra, didn’t you?” Ms Page said.
He replied “no”, then later added: “I did not believe that I deliberately hid anything.”
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Mr Jenkins, who is facing a police investigation for alleged perjury, told the inquiry in his witness statement that Post Office, which has a power to bring its own prosecutions, had applied pressure on him to support its case.
He claimed Post Office lawyer Warwick Tatford had looked over a draft of his witness statement for Mrs Misra’s trial and recommended he “make some points more strongly in favour of the Post Office”.
He explained how he thought such actions had been “normal practice”, saying he had not understood his duties of impartiality as an expert witness in trials until 2020, by which time he had been involved in more than a dozen cases.
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He later conceded, however, in his evidence that he had seen advice setting out what was expected of him in 2016, explaining that had not been the focus for him in the documents he received.
Also on Thursday, Mr Jenkins told the inquiry where he thought the blame could be laid.
“My feeling was then and is now that the issues to do with this are down to the way Post Office has behaved rather than actual faults in the Horizon system… I believe that I told the truth as I understood it at the time.”
“You were a Fujitsu man doing what Fujitsu needed you to do to protect the monster,” Ms Page put to him.
Mr Jenkins said: “I didn’t think it was a monster.”
During his evidence, Mr Jenkins has said he was sorry for what happened to Mrs Misra.
She told Sky News on Tuesday that she would not accept that apology.
The chief executive of Boots, Britain’s biggest high street pharmacy chain, is quitting after its owner’s plans for a £5bn sale or stock market listing stalled.
Sky News has learnt that Sebastian James, who has run Boots since 2018, will leave the company in November.
City sources said this weekend that he had accepted a new role in the healthcare industry.
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His exit comes soon after it emerged that New York-listed Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), the British retailer’s owner, had decided for the second time in two years against pursuing a sale or stock market flotation of the chain.
An announcement about Mr James’s departure is expected in the coming days.
WBA is not yet thought to have lined up a successor.
Mr James, who previously ran the electricals retailer Dixons (now named Currys), recently endorsed Sir Keir Starmer – a notable move because of his long friendship with Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary.
His departure from Boots will come during the Nottingham-based company’s 175th year.
Boots employs about 52,000 people and trades from roughly 1,900 stores.
Boots has around 1,900 stores. Pic: iStock
Its recent trading performance has been strong, with WBA this week saying that like-for-like sales at Boots during the quarter to the end of May rose by 6% and 5.8% across its retail and pharmacy operations respectively.
An insider said Mr James had overseen a successful turnaround, with market share having grown for 13 successive quarters.
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Ex-Fujitsu engineer denies ‘protecting the monster’
It has been a rare bright spot for WBA, which has had a torrid time and has seen its shares slump.
A WBA spokesperson said this week: “As Walgreens Boots Alliance continues a strategic review of the Company’s assets, we took a critical look at Boots.
“While we believe there is significant interest in this business at the right time, Boots’ growth, strategic strength and cashflow remain key contributors to Walgreens Boots Alliance.
“We are committed to continuing to invest in Boots UK and to find innovative ways for this business to fulfill its potential.”
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During a previous auction in 2022, only one bidder – a consortium of Apollo Global Management and Reliance Industries – tabling a formal offer worth about £5.5bn.
However, growing concerns about the global economy had triggered severe doubts among large banks which help finance leveraged buyouts, with Boots among the biggest such deals in Europe.
Among the other challenges facing prospective acquirers at the time was finding an adequate solution for Boots’ £8bn pension scheme – one of the largest private retirement funds in the UK.
This issue has now been resolved through an insurance deal struck with Legal & General.
Like many retailers, Boots had a turbulent pandemic, announcing 4,000 job cuts in 2020 as a consequence of a restructuring of its Nottingham head office and store management teams.
Shortly before the COVID pandemic, Boots earmarked about 200 of its UK stores for closure, a reflection of changing shopping habits.
Boots’ heritage dates back to John Boot opening a herbal remedies store in Nottingham in 1849.
It opened its 1000th UK store in 1933.
In 2006, Boots merged with Alliance Unichem, a drug wholesaler, with the buyout firm KKR acquiring the combined group in an £11bn deal the following year.
In 2012, Walgreens acquired a 45% stake in Alliance Boots, completing its buyout of the business two years later.
Boots declined to comment on Mr James’s exit on Saturday.
Britain’s fourth-biggest household energy supplier is lining up bankers to explore options including bringing in a new investor or a sale, 15 years after it launched in a bid to challenge the industry’s oligopoly.
Sky News has learnt that OVO Group, which was founded by Stephen Fitzpatrick, is close to hiring Rothschild to assist with a strategic review of the business.
City sources said this weekend that a range of possibilities would be considered during the process, which is expected to take several months.
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These are likely to include a refinancing – with talks already underway about OVO’s existing borrowings – as well as issuing new shares to prospective investors, or a partial or full sale by some of the company’s shareholders.
An outright sale of the business is considered by insiders to be unlikely at this point, but is expected to be explored as part of the strategic review.
OVO, which has about four million customers, sits behind Centrica, the owner of British Gas, Octopus Energy and E.ON Next in the rankings of Britain’s leading gas and electricity suppliers, according to market share data provided by Ofgem, the industry regulator.
Under Mr Fitzpatrick, who launched OVO in 2009, the company positioned itself as a challenger brand offering superior service to the industry’s established players.
OVO’s transformational moment came in 2020, when it bought the retail supply arm of SSE, transforming it overnight into one of Britain’s leading energy companies.
Its growth has not been without difficulties, with insiders referring to a challenged relationship with Ofgem and a torrent of customer complaints about overcharging.
Stephen Fitzpatrick launched OVO in 2009. Pic: OVO
In recent months, OVO’s shareholders have reshaped its leadership team, bringing in the former J Sainsbury chief executive Justin King as its chairman.
In May, Mr King recruited David Buttress, the former Just Eat boss who was briefly Boris Johnson’s cost-of-living tsar, as the energy group’s new chief executive.
Mr Buttress replaced Raman Bhatia, who left to join Starling Bank.
He is expected to focus on sharpening the company’s customer service performance as well as exploring ways to further diversify its products and services.
Key to OVO’s valuation will be the growth of its technology platform, Kaluza, which was set up to license its software to other energy suppliers, and provides customers with smart electric vehicle charging and heat pumps.
OVO recently announced that AGL Energy, one of Australia’s biggest energy suppliers, had bought a 20% stake in Kaluza at a $500m valuation.
Kaluza is understood to be exploring further expansion opportunities in Europe, Japan and the US.
OVO has also entered the electric vehicle car charging sector under the brand Charge Anywhere, adding 34,000 public charging points across the UK.
In 2022, OVO Group made an unadjusted loss of £1.3bn, which it blamed on a decline in the value of energy it had bought in advance to meet future supply commitments.
It said this had “no cash impact” in a corporate filing, and that this value would rise as customers used the energy it had bought.
Last summer, the company announced a £200m secondary share sale which saw existing investors Mayfair Equity Partners and Morgan Stanley Investment Management increasing their stakes in the company.
Other investors include Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese conglomerate.
Mayfair is thought to hold a stake of over 30%, while Mitsubishi owns approximately 20%.
Mr Fitzpatrick also remains a significant shareholder.
This weekend, it was unclear which of OVO’s investors might seek a disposal of their interests, although insiders acknowledged that a sizeable proportion of the company’s shares could end up changing hands.
Like its rivals, OVO has been contending with the impact of the industry price cap after a period of enormous price spikes which sent customers’ bills soaring.
Last month, Ofgem said the cap would fall in the quarter from July to September by the annualised equivalent of £122, to £1568.
Other big players in the sector include EDF and Scottish Power, which is owned by Spain’s Iberdrola.
In recent months, Octopus Energy, run by Greg Jackson, has crystallised a valuation of over £7bn by selling stakes to a number of new investors.
Centrica has a market valuation on the London Stock Exchange of £7.3bn.
OVO, whose valuation in any major transaction was unclear this weekend, declined to comment.
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