Seema Misra, a former sub-postmistress, has refused to accept an apology from Gareth Jenkins, a former Fujitsu engineer, whose testimony was a key factor in her wrongful conviction. Mrs Misra was wrongly jailed in 2010 for two charges of theft and false accounting while she was eight weeks pregnant, due to data from the Post Office’s Horizon accounting software. The software’s faults caused the wrongful prosecution of approximately 700 sub-postmasters between 1999 and 2015. Mr Jenkins, who was involved in the software’s development at Fujitsu and appeared as an expert witness in the associated Post Office trials, failed to tell the court about a bug in the software that could have exonerated Mrs Misra. Her conviction was quashed in 2021.
Mr Jenkins’ apology, presented in a statement submitted to the Post Office Inquiry, was deemed by Mrs Misra to be “too little, too late”, saying she wanted to know “why on earth he did what he did”. The former engineer, who was part of a team developing Horizon, denied being the system’s chief architect. He said that the software worked well “most of the time”, but admitted he should have conducted more research into bugs and errors in the system before giving evidence in court. Mr Jenkins is one of the key witnesses in the inquiry and will be questioned over four days, a longer period than any other witness so far, including former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells. Mr Jenkins is also the subject of a police investigation into potential perjury.
Mr Jenkins denied any wrongdoing in written evidence to the inquiry, and suggested that he had not received adequate guidance or legal oversight from Post Office lawyers. He clarified his actions, saying “I did not lie in my written evidence nor in my oral evidence”, and that “the idea that I would lie about Horizon, knowing that an innocent person could be convicted and imprisoned, is completely abhorrent to me.” Mr Jenkins’ testimony in 15 sub-postmaster cases was pivotal in helping the Post Office defend the faulty software system in criminal and civil cases, even though he was aware of its bugs and glitches
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