How The Mighty Are Fallen?

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More watching the Post Office Scandal Enquiry today, with the testimony - and I use that word advisedly - of two former Chief Execs of Fujitsu: Richard Christou, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Fujitsu Services Holdings plc; and Duncan Tait, former CEO of Fujitsu Services Ltd. The former seemed simply peeved to be there answering questions at all, interjecting the interrogative 'Yes?' as if to suggest that he was simply above the whole affair and really should be playing golf in the Algarve, rather than answering questions put to him about his part in what, after all, is a matter of some public gravity, to say the least.

His assertion that the product provided to Post Office Ltd., which was designed and supplied by the company he headed, did not [I paraphrase wickedly, but the crux and substance of the issue remain] actually need to function correctly, so long as the word of the contractual relationship with the client was kept [he even tried the 'Angels dancing on the head of a pin' ruse to argue the semantics of, and suggest that the term 'robust' had no legal definition], frankly left me speechless, which is a very rare turn of events in this household.

The next 'turn' on stage seemed to have the worst case of corporate amnesia imaginable for the 'boss' of an IT company - and, it has to be said, he had an actual IT background, early on his career - claiming that he had not engaged with any of the Computer Weekly articles concerning the affair, which had been a regular feature in the paper since they first exposed the scandal in 2009. Computer Weekly has been the trade journal for a very long time: to suggest that someone in such a senior rôle in such a large IT company would not partake of it regularly alongside his daily Financial Times is frankly nonsense. He also claimed to not have watched any TV documentary coverage of the affair at the time; a bonkers assertion, and transparently false.

Whether any of this heralds the imminent demise of the current incarnation of the deeply-government-embedded ICL, now Fujitsu, must still be considered moot, as despite the European head of the company stating that it had written to the Cabinet Office in January of this year, saying that, in light of the public enquiry/outrage, it would not bid for any new contracts or renewals with the government, unless the government requested it to do so; it still expects - projects - to haul in a further £1.3bn of contracts from them over the next twelve-month, comprised of approx £800m of public sector work and £500m of UK national security contracts [source: Computer Weekly]. Someone, somewhere, still has their finger up someone's arse over this, so we remain to be convinced that things will change, whatever the outcome of the Public Enquiry and whatever criminal trials ensue from its findings. We'll see...

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