Fujitsu apologizes after false accusations against British postal employees

The Japanese computer group Fujitsu apologized on Tuesday to the almost one thousand former directors of British post offices, unjustly accused of theft due to defective software they produced, recognizing that it should participate in compensating the victims.

Pressed by “one of the biggest miscarriages of justice” of the history of the United Kingdom, the British government promised last Wednesday to compensate “quickly” and annul all existing judicial charges against the former post office branch directors, wrongly accused between 1999 and 2015.

Postal employees had to wait for a fictional series to be broadcast on television to make the public and authorities aware of this scandal, in which thousands of officials were unjustly accused.

Postal service leaders, refusing to acknowledge problems with the software, forced workers to pay for accounting shortfalls wrongly attributed to theft, driving many of them out of business. Some were imprisoned.

“Fujitsu wants to apologize for the role it played in this terrible miscarriage of justicePaul Patterson, the company’s director for Europe, told a parliamentary committee.

“There were errors in the system. And we help the postal service process workers. We are sincerely sorry”Patterson continued.

Some deputies asked that numerous public contracts be reviewed with Fujitsu as a result of these software errors.

The government will present a new law in Parliament so that victims are “quickly exonerated and compensated”, the prime minister promised last Wednesday.

Instead of individual legal proceedings that could be long and painful, the text will annul all of these convictions, an extremely rare measure.