That sentence is quite hard to follow – perhaps deliberately so. As far as I can tell, he seems to be saying the system worked even when it didn’t. 

A barrister challenged the Fujitsu employee on whether this was really his opinion or the company line. The employee said it was his own opinion. The barrister then read out evidence a different Fujitsu employee had given at Seema Misra’s trial nine years before. It was identical to the word, including the misspelling of “affect”. 

The garbled prose therefore seems to have represented Fujitsu’s view that Horizon operated properly even when it wasn’t operating properly. Hopefully, the independent public inquiry being conducted by Sir Wyn Williams can get to the bottom of that particular paradox.

Fujitsu’s role in this scandal can be traced back to an IT system that was first set up as a private finance initiative between the Post Office, the Benefits Agency and a tech company called ICL in 1996. The idea was to create a swipe card system for over-the-counter benefit and pension payments in order to help reduce fraud.

ICL had ranked third out of three bidders based on technological nous but was picked because, like the budgie, it was cheap. And, guess what? It was a total and utter disaster. The idea got binned in 1999 at a cost to the taxpayer of roughly £700m. Around the same time, ICL was swallowed up by Fujitsu.

In an attempt to rescue something out of the ruins of this smouldering catastrophe, the Post Office used some of the technology to digitise its branch accounting system, which up until that point had been paper-based. It was a perfect example of the sunk-cost fallacy – the tendency to follow through with a doomed project because of the time, effort and money that has already been invested.

The result was Horizon, which then proceded to spew out erroneous information that led to the Post Office prosecuting 736 sub-postmasters between 2000 and 2014 at an average of one a week. In total, 60 people were convicted and a third of those were jailed. 

Fast forward to the end of 2019 and, following the conclusion of several long-running civil cases, the Post Office agreed to settle with 555 claimants. The convictions of 72 former postmasters have been quashed.

There will doubtless be a string of future court cases and civil actions – not least against the Post Office for malicious prosecution. Nick Read, the current boss of the Post Office, has promised that victims will receive compensation by the end of this year. The cost to the taxpayer will likely be astronomical.

But, while there has been some measure of justice, there has been precious little in the way of accountability. So far, nobody who has held senior positions at the Post Office or Fujitsu over the past 20 years has been held responsible for the scandal.

Almost unbelievably, the Government is still working with the Japanese company, awarding Fujitsu public sector contracts worth £3bn since 2013, about half of that in the past five years, according to Computer Weekly. It manages IT systems at the Home Office, HM Revenue & Customs and the Ministry of Defence and has a contract to maintain Royal Navy warships.

Campaigners have rightly asked whether the Government’s reliance on Fujitsu might be part of the reason why the Post Office inquiry originally didn’t have the statutory powers to force companies to hand over documents or witnesses to testify.

In a recent debate in the House of Lords, the Government spokesman Baroness Bloomfield revealed that Fujitsu is no longer a preferred supplier to the Government. However, she added: “In common with any other company, it can bid for contracts.”

When pressed on the issue by other peers, Baroness Bloomfield said: “Obviously there will be repercussions for [Fujitsu], but I do not want to prejudge what the inquiry will set out.” She added that, while Fujitsu is at liberty to bid for future government contracts, “I am sure the history of this sorry saga will be taken into account in that process”.

I wish I shared the Baroness’s confidence. It is all too plausible that Whitehall’s right hand might be unaware of what the left hand is doing and could dole out contracts when it is abundantly clear the Government should not touch Fujitsu with a 20-foot barge pole. 

The fact that a High Court judge has referred the Japanese company to the director of public prosecutions over “grave concerns” about the evidence given by its employees is sufficient justification for reticence.

For Fujitsu to be awarded one more penny of taxpayer money before the full facts are dragged out into the daylight would heap further insult on the postmasters who have already suffered more than most of us can possibly fathom.