Fujitsu should pay hundreds of millions of pounds over UK Post Office scandal - minister

Japan's Fujitsu should be contributing hundreds of millions of pounds to pay the compensation bill the British government is expecting to face over the Post Office Scandal, postal minister Kevin Hollinrake told the BBC on Wednesday.

When asked on BBC Radio if he thought Fujitsu could face a bill of "hundreds of millions of pounds" to compensate victims, Hollinrake said: "Yes, I do." "This will cost the taxpayer a billion pounds, maybe more than that," he said, adding that he "absolutely" thought the Tokyo-listed company should contribute a significant proportion of the redress cost.

The IT group's European head Paul Patterson last week

told a parliamentary panel that the company had a "moral obligation" to compensate the hundreds of Post Office workers who were wrongly convicted of fraud, theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2015. The recent airing of a TV drama on the scandal, which arose as a result of Fujitsu's faulty Horizon software, has rekindled public interest in the matter.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called it one of the country's biggest miscarriages of justice and has set out plans to mass exonerate those convicted.