Tory donor linked to Post Office scandal IT firm now under fire for £400m broadband contracts
Transparency campaigners and politicians are calling for urgent answers about a prominent Tory donor and former Fujitsu UK chair’s involvement in the awarding of almost £400m worth of broadband contracts, following an investigation by this newsletter.
Simon Blagden was non-executive chair of Fujitsu Telecommunications between 2005 and 2019, and also served on the leadership team of Fujitsu UK, the IT firm embroiled in the Post Office Horizon scandal.
Blagden now has an £80,000-a-year job chairing a government agency - Building Digital UK - which has given a series of high-value contracts to a broadband firm that Blagden was previously paid to lobby for.
Blagden has donated more than £400,000 to the Conservatives over the past two decades, including £189,449 since December 2019, when a High Court judge ruled that Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon software had led to thousands of sub-postmasters being wrongly accused of fraud…
