European boss of Post Office IT scandal firm Fujitsu to step down

The European boss of Fujitsu, the company behind the Horizon software at the heart of the Post Office IT scandal, is to step down from his role in March.Paul Patterson, who is the chief executive of the European division of the company, will become non-executive chair of Fujitsu’s UK business, where he will “continue managing the company’s response” to the inquiry into the scandal.Patterson, who has worked at the Japanese IT provider since 2010, represented the company at the public inquiry.Two years ago, he told the judge-led hearings Fujitsu had a “moral obligation” to pay financial redress to the hundreds of Post Office operators wrongfully pursued through the courts over discrepancies in their accounts linked to bugs in Horizon software.He admitted the company had known the accounting IT system was faulty since the 1990s, with the government estimating the final cost to taxpayers of payouts to be £1.8bn.In separate testimony to MPs this month, Patterson said Fujitsu was “not a parasite”, after being criticised for continuing to take hundreds of millions of pounds from UK government contracts while refusing to give a compensation figure for Horizon victims.He told the Commons business and trade committee that he stood by his previous comments and that Fujitsu would calculate the level of financial redress due to victims when the inquiry, led by Sir Wyn Williams, publishes the final volume of its conclusions.So far, Williams has only published the first tranche of findings from his two-year inquiry, which revealed the scandal may have led to more than 13 suicides.Patterson told MPs: “When we last spoke I agreed with you on the moral obligation topic. I have maintained that position over the last two years since I saw you.“We need to be informed by Sir Wyn’s report. We want to see that report. The quantum we will decide when we get to the final report. We were involved from the very start, [Horizon] did have bugs and errors in systems and [we] did help the Post Office in the prosecutions of the subpostmasters.”The latest UK government figures estimate that £1.33bn has so far been paid out to more than 10,000 victims.A spokesperson for Fujitsu said Patterson’s move was part of broader succession planning across the business.