Patterson is being asked about his career at Fujitsu.

He lists his current job title and expands on his previous roles in the company. One notable aspect is that he was involved in selling new contracts to the Post Office in 2012/2013.

He says he was involved with the Post Office for "four, five years".

Patterson clarifies that he was involed in sales during this period, but not what he calls "service delivery".

This, he says, was overseen by a separate team.

Image source, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Paul Patterson begins his evidence with an apology.

On behalf of Fujistu, Patterson says: "To the sub-postmasters and their families, we apologise."

He says the company is "sorry for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice", adding: "We are determined to continue to support this inquiry to get to the truth, wherever it lays."

Patterson says Fujitsu will also engage with government "on suitable contribution and redress" for sub-postmasters and their families.

This is the first occasion on which he has given oral evidence to the inquiry, but he did offer similar words to MPs earlier this week.

Image source, Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Paul Patterson, Fujitsu's Europe director, is sworn in and the hearing begins.

We'll be providing text coverage of the key lines in this stream.

You can also watch the events in Aldwych House live by clicking Play at the top of the page.

Today’s Post Office inquiry hearing is due to get under way in a couple of minutes' time. Fujitsu’s Paul Patterson is the only person giving evidence today.

He’ll be sworn in at 10:00 GMT, with the session expected to go into the afternoon.

You can watch all the latest from Aldwych House, in central London, by pressing Play at the top of the page.

Sam Hancock
Reporting from the inquiry

This is the scene outside central London's Aldwych House, where the Post Office inquiry is taking place - as photographers and journalists wait to capture the arrival of Fujitsu's Europe chief Paul Patterson.

Inside, people have begun arriving and I've already heard one or two comment on what a "big day" this is. One man joked to a staff member that the "big boss is in today".

Before the doors to the inquiry room are opened, those of us waiting to be let in are held in a rather plush common space with a kitchen, sofas and small tables. I'm sat at one of them now.

Meanwhile, lawyers, their clients (former sub-postmasters and postmistresses) and the person giving evidence tend to go off to private legal rooms set up on an adjoining corridor.

A former Kent sub-postmistress said she used almost £10,000 of her life savings to cover costs due to a system fault which falsely reported shortfalls.

Anu Aron, who ran Speldhurst Post Office, paid her employees out of her own money to balance the books during the Horizon Post Office scandal.

"I wasn't myself at all. No smiles, no laughs - just anxiety," she said.

Fujitsu, which owns the Horizon system, has apologised for the errors in its system.

• Read more here

Image source, PA Media

• 1999: The Horizon accounting system is rolled out in Post Offices across the UK
• 2000: The first issue with the system is reported by Alan Bates, sub-postmaster of a branch in Wales
• 2003: Bates loses his job after refusing to accept responsibility for missing funds in the branch accounts
• 2004: More sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses find themselves asked questions about missing funds - at times in the tens of thousands of pounds. Jobs are lost, some are declared bankrupt and some eventually sent to prison
• 2010: A high-profile case of wrongful conviction occurs - pregnant Surrey sub-postmistress Seema Misra is jailed after being accused of stealing £74,000
• 2012: Formal investigations into the Horizon software begin
• 2015: The Post Office halts private prosecutions of sub-postmasters
• 2017: Legal action is launched against the Post Office by a group of 555 sub-postmasters
• 2019: Post Office CEO Paula Vennells stands down, before the company agrees to pay £58m to the 555 sub-postmasters
• 2021: The public inquiry into the scandal begins
• 2023: The government announces that every wrongly convicted sub-postmaster will be offered £600,000 in compensation
• 2024: There's a resurgence of interest in the scandal after ITV releases a mini-series titled Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Rishi Sunak's government announces legislation to reverse the prosecutions of 736 sub-postmasters. Vennells hands back her CBE

Image source, ITV

The ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office has thrust the scandal into the national consciousness.

The show came out on New Year’s Day and follows the real story of postmaster Alan Bates and the legal battle he led and won against the Post Office.

Since the series aired on 1 January, more than 100 other potential victims have contacted their lawyers, claiming they were wrongly prosecuted by the institution. The programme's finale was watched by more than 10 million people.

The government announced plans to clear the names of hundreds of people wrongly convicted in the scandal.

• How a TV drama shook up Britain - in just a week

Sam Hancock
Reporting from the inquiry

While Paul Patterson spoke to a panel of MPs in Westminster earlier in the week, those of us attending the inquiry heard from another, more junior Fujitsu employee.

It was quite something to read the statements Patterson was making at Portcullis House - a little more than a mile away - while those of us at Aldwych House watched Rajbinder Sangha paint a picture of the small team she had been part of.

Sangha was a fraud and litigation support officer from 2010-2016, and as part of her role at Fujitsu she harvested data from local Post Office branches and passed it on to the Post Office. Email chains and memos - some of which Sangha was looped in on - showed that the data was faulty, that senior staff knew as much, and yet it was being used to convict sub-postmasters of fraud and false accounting.

Sangha, who’s still employed by Fujitsu today, said she had never been given training on how all this data could be used in court - and that people more senior than her would’ve been across such detail. But pushed to explain who knew what, Sangha repeatedly answered: “I can’t remember”.

Meanwhile, Patterson told MPs that Fujitsu management knew about “bugs and errors” in the Horizon system at a very early stage and apologised for the firm’s part in this scandal.

What more will he say today? It depends what questions the inquiry lawyers ask when things get going in about an hour's time.

Image source, EPA

Time for a quick definition of some terms that are certain to come up repeatedly today.

Sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses are managers at Post Offices across Britain. They take responsibility for the everyday running of a Post Office, including the money going in and out of the business.

They handle people’s savings and pensions, and are often at the heart of their communities.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses - an average of one a week - based on information from a faulty computer system called Horizon. Some 283 other cases were brought by bodies including the Crown Prosecution Service.

Postmasters and postmistresses were jailed, went bankrupt, saw their marriages destroyed - and some even died before their names were cleared.

Fujitsu’s Paul Patterson used Tuesday's appearance before MPs to apologise for the role his company played in the Post Office’s prosecution of hundreds of sub-postmasters. Here's a look at what else he said:

• Patterson said Fujitsu was “truly sorry” and referred to the entire saga as an “appalling miscarriage of justice"
• He told MPs the firm had a “moral obligation” to contribute to the government’s compensation scheme for sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses
• Asked when exactly Fujitsu management became aware that the Horizon system was faulty, Patterson said there were known “bugs and errors” in the system at a very early stage (it was rolled out by the Post Office in 1999)
• But he said all information about errors received by Fujitsu was then shared with the Post Office
• The firm’s Europe chief Fujitsu was a “different” company to what it was in the early 2000s - a point he admitted needed to be proven to “our customers, to government and to the wider society here in the UK”
• Both Patterson and the Post Office’s CEO Nick Read, who also spoke to MPs, were accused at times of failing to answer questions or having a lack of knowledge of certain events

Image source, EPA

As we said a little earlier, Paul Patterson has already been in the news this week, after he appeared on Tuesday before the Business and Trade Committee - a House of Commons select committee made up of 11 cross-party MPs. Here’s a quick look at his career at Fujitsu:

Patterson joined the Japanese tech company in 2010 as UK sales director, before becoming group sales and marketing director the following year and then private sector executive director in 2013.

From there, he went on to become a vice president at the company in 2016, before moving into the role of Fujitsu’s Europe CEO in 2019. That’s the role he holds today.

(Remember, it was between 1999 and 2015 that the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses based on Fujitsu's faulty Horizon IT system.)

Patterson’s not the first Fujitsu employee to give evidence at the inquiry. In fact, his appearance today comes at the end of a week that’s seen a host of former and present Fujitsu staff answer questions about the company’s involvement in this saga.

Image source, PA Media

While we wait to hear from Fujitsu’s Paul Patterson later this morning, let’s remind ourselves of what the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry is.

It began in June 2021 - 12 years after victims of the scandal first called for it. These latest evidence sessions are set against a backdrop of increased scrutiny about the miscarriage of justice, following the broadcast of ITV's popular mini-series Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

• Who's in charge? Its chairman is Sir Wyn Williams, a former High Court judge. Since his retirement he has mostly been involved in mediating sports-related disputes - until he took on the Post Office inquiry
• What's been covered so far? The inquiry has already heard about how the scandal has impacted victims, looked at the design and rollout of the Horizon IT system, and considered how disputes were resolved and how errors in the system were fixed
• Where are we at now? Phase four. This is all about the action taken against sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, and includes looking at what both the Post Office and Fujitsu knew about bugs in the Horizon system
• How long will it take? There are another three phases to get through - the inquiry’s official timeline, external says it expects to have done this by the end of summer
• What can it do? Public inquiries respond to"public concern" about events. They can demand evidence, and compel witnesses to attend, but at the end no-one is found guilty or innocent. Instead, conclusions and recommendations are published by the chair

Sam Hancock
Reporting from the inquiry

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the ongoing public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal.

Giving evidence today is Paul Patterson, the CEO of Fujitsu’s European operation. You may have heard his name mentioned on Tuesday when he joined others in taking questions from MPs and former sub-postmasters Alan Bates and Jo Hamilton.

He said then that Fujitsu was “truly sorry” for the part it had played in helping the Post Office prosecute hundreds of colleagues of Bates and Hamilton.

The tech company's faulty Horizon IT software was rolled out across hundreds of Post Office branches in 1999. The issues with Horizon ultimately led to hundreds of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses being accused of fraud, false accounting, even theft.

Patterson’s appearance at the select committee has only drummed up interest in what he might say today, here at the inquiry.

I’ll be inside the room, letting you know what’s happening, while my colleagues back in the newsroom provide live text updates of what’s said.

You’ll be able to watch the hearing by hitting Play at the top of this page - stay tuned for more.