Fujitsu Ltd has held more than ￡3.4 billion (US$4.3 billion) of active contracts with parts of the British state including the Bank of England (BOE) since 2019, despite its role in the UK’s Post Office scandal.
A parliamentary committee said ￡1.4 billion of those contracts were awarded after a 2019 court ruling which associated Fujitsu with the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of local branch managers for theft and fraud. The Japanese technology company supplied post offices with its Horizon software, which contained bugs.
The contracts included ￡2.8 billion of deals with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), agreements worth ￡629.3 million with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and a ￡417,586 commitment with the Bank of England, according to data from the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee.
Photo: AFP
Members of Parliament on the committee sourced the figures from public bodies specifically affiliated with the Treasury, as part of a wider examination of the scandal.
Several of the contracts are still active, including ￡1.4 billion with HMRC and ￡9 million with the FCA. They were for services including resale of “threat and vulnerability management software” at the FCA and the BOE, and support for traders submitting customs declarations at HMRC.
The BOE said it no longer holds any active contracts with Fujitsu, while the FCA said it had considered ending a contract due to poor performance, but in the end decided to carry on.
“I hope this will aid transparency and scrutiny around the role of Fujitsu as a public sector supplier,” Treasury Committee chair Harriett Baldwin said.
The uncovering of the contracts comes after Baldwin, on behalf of the Treasury Committee, wrote letters to a swathe of Treasury-linked organizations asking them about their relationships with Fujitsu.
Permanent secretary to the Treasury James Bowler confirmed in a letter to Baldwin that the department had not directly awarded any contracts to Fujitsu since 2019 — nor had the company submitted any bids for Treasury business.
FCA chief operating officer Emily Shepperd said the regulator’s main contract with Fujitsu expired in 2022. Fujitsu now provides some services as a third-party agent, she added, but interaction is limited.
The Post Office scandal has received heightened attention in recent weeks after the airing of a TV drama which centered on victims of the debacle.
A public inquiry is ongoing to determine who is to blame for the convictions and false accusations which destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of sub-postmasters. Many who were not convicted were still forced to pay sums which they were wrongfully told they owed.
The inquiry heard last month that errors and defects in Horizon were known about by both Fujitsu and Post Office staff from the beginning of its deployment.
Fujitsu executive Paul Patterson has apologized for the company’s role in the scandal and said it should bear a moral responsibility to contribute to redress payments.
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
About 1,000 participants, including more than 200 venture capitalists, joined the Taiwan Demo Day in Silicon Valley on Saturday, the largest iteration to date of the event held ahead of Nvidia Corp’s annual GPU Technology Conference which runs from today to Thursday. Taiwan Demo Day, co-organized by the Taiwan Next Foundation and the Startup Island Taiwan Silicon Valley Hub, took place at the Computer History Museum in California, showcasing 12 teams focused on physical artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI technologies. Katie Hsieh (謝凱婷), founder of the Taiwan Next Foundation, said the event highlighted the strength of the Taiwan-US start-up ecosystem, with
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
RSS