Fujitsu injects one other £80m into UK arm amid Submit Workplace scandal fallout
Fujitsu Japan continues to bail out UK arm, with an £80m money injection taking the full transferred to £360bn since 2024, when particulars of its Submit Workplace scandal position turned extensively recognized.
As Pc Weekly revealed in 2024, Fujitsu UK obtained £200m in April that 12 months, which a senior govt instructed workers was to handle some monetary indicators, which might have prevented it from bidding for UK public sector work. In the identical month in 2025, it obtained an additional £80m, and this week, the identical quantity was injected into the UK enterprise by the Japanese large.
The most recent cost, on 31 March, comes as the corporate tells workers that almost 10% of its UK employees can be made redundant and whereas the federal government waits to listen to what Fujitsu’s cost in the direction of the price of the Submit Workplace scandal, which it fuelled, can be.
In an announcement of a voluntary redundancy programme, which goals to chop 425 jobs, Fujitsu’s UK head, Anwen Owen, stated: “We’re taking this step in the beginning of our transformation journey in order that we are able to proceed to spend money on the areas of our enterprise that our prospects want most, to construct a less complicated, extra reliant firm, and to be finest positioned for long-term power.”
A Fujitsu spokesperson stated: “The £80m recapitalisation demonstrates Fujitsu Group’s long-term dedication to the UK and can strengthen [the UK] steadiness sheet. It follows comparable funds in 2024 and 2025. That is a part of an everyday company assessment course of protecting all authorized entities within the Fujitsu group. It’s unrelated to our ongoing conversations with authorities relating to contribution to compensation.”
One supply within the IT providers sector instructed Pc Weekly: “£360m injected by Japan over the past three years, contracts misplaced, bidding paused, redundancies ongoing, authorized motion underway and a skinny pipeline that doesn’t stand as much as scrutiny, with a dad or mum assure wanted simply to get the accounts signed. In some unspecified time in the future it’s important to name it what it’s, a sustained management failure in a enterprise that didn’t want to finish up right here.”
Because the broadcast of ITV’s dramatisation of the Submit Workplace scandal, Fujitsu has confronted strain from the general public and politicians.
The human price of the scandal just isn’t measurable, however the monetary price is. Billions of kilos of taxpayers’ cash have been spent on legal professionals and compensation for victims, in addition to a public inquiry and a nationwide police investigation.
Based on the newest authorities knowledge, it has to this point paid about £1.4bn to over 10,600 claimants who suffered by the hands of the Horizon system’s errors within the Submit Workplace Horizon system from Fujitsu.
Authorized prices for the Submit Workplace and authorities related to the Submit Workplace scandal run into a number of hundred million kilos.
In the meantime, the statutory public inquiry into the scandal has to this point price about £50m, whereas the nationwide police investigation into the Submit Workplace scandal, Operation Olympos, is anticipated to price over £50m.
Then, there was billions of kilos of taxpayers’ cash spent on changing Fujitsu’s controversial Horizon system. Tons of of tens of millions of kilos had been wasted on failed makes an attempt because the Submit Workplace, beneath enormous public and authorities strain, rushed into initiatives earlier than the present plan was in place.
Because of delays changing the Horizon system, Fujitsu has continued to win contracts with the Submit Workplace, additionally value lots of of tens of millions of kilos. It is not going to be out of contract with the Submit Workplace till the summer time of subsequent 12 months, and provided that the present alternative challenge goes to plan.
Nevertheless, regardless of its enormous public sector earnings, Fujitsu is but to declare how a lot it can contribute to the general prices of a scandal it enabled. The provider backed the Submit Workplace for practically 20 years when it claimed that errors within the horizon system couldn’t trigger the unexplained accounting shortfalls subpostmasters had been blamed and punished for.
In October 2025, campaigning peer James Arbuthnot demanded Fujitsu pay £700m within the interim. “Fujitsu has brought on nice hurt to hundreds of individuals and may pay a large amount to compensate for this,” he stated.
The Submit Workplace scandal was first uncovered by Pc Weekly in 2009, revealing the tales of seven subpostmasters and the issues they suffered attributable to Horizon accounting software program, which led to probably the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British historical past (see beneath timeline of Pc Weekly articles in regards to the scandal since 2009).
