If I were a chap called Duncan Tait I would be feeling a tad uncomfortable this morning.
Were he to turn to Page 5 of The Times he would see he had been named as the Fujitsu boss who told Post Office chief Paula Vennells that Horizon computer system was a secure as Fort Knox.
Fort Knox is a military base south of Louisville, Kentucky, where the US government keeps 147 troy ounces of gold bullion with a value of $290 billion dollars. It’s the majority of US gold reserves.
So it must be a safe place.
Tait, 57, was chief executive of Fujitsu UK between 2011 and 2014. He was paid around £3million a year. The Times has had it confirmed by two sources that he made the Ford Knox comment to Ms Vennells.
Kelvin MacKenzie delivers a withering verdict on Duncan Tait
Vennells, who led the Post Office between 2010 and 2019 claimed she was told that branch accounts could not be changed without the knowledge of the sub-postmasters.
The conversation has always been at the centre of her defence of her actions at pursuing convictions of sub-postmasters who could not balance their books. Almost a thousand were convicted. They were all innocent. Their lives were destroyed.
In 2014 Tait was promoted to a global job and stayed with Fujitsu for another five years before receiving a £2.5million payoff. Today he is a senior exec at the FTSE 250 car dealership Inchcape. There he has earned £4.3million and bonuses ( plus a generous options scheme) in the last two years and lives in a £4million house in North London.
It is all going rather well for Tate compared to Mr Bates and his colleagues.
The question for Tait is; Did he have any inkling or knowledge that there were bugs in the Horizon system? And if not, why not. After all the current UK Fujitsu boss says it had been known since 1999 that there were problems with the tech.
As a matter of urgency Tait needs to be called before the judge-led inquiry which is doing such a splendid job for the poor sub-postmasters.
My advice to Tait is to take a good dollop of your money and hire a decent lawyer. My sense is that you are going to need it.
