BRITISH CIVIL SERVANT CONVICTED OF FRAUD AFTER SECRETLY HOLDING EIGHT GOVERNMENT JOBS
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By Aishat Momoh. O.
A British civil servant who secretly held multiple government jobs simultaneously and fraudulently obtained more than £284,000 in taxpayers’ money has been convicted of nine counts of fraud.
Kashim Chowdhury, 56, from east London, was found guilty of eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failing to disclose information.
According to the BBC, the jury returned a unanimous verdict on Monday after seven hours of deliberation.
The court heard that Chowdhury secured eight overlapping full-time public sector jobs between 2020 and 2023, earning a total of £350,000. He held five government positions simultaneously in the spring of 2023.
Prosecutors accused him of “deliberate, intentional dishonesty” and exploiting the system by providing false information about his employment status on job application forms and failing to disclose his other positions to prospective employers.
Among the organisations where he worked were the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Health Security Agency, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office.
At one point in the spring of 2023, he was contracted to work 183 hours weekly, more than the total number of hours in a seven-day week.
The report said Chowdhury was permitted to work entirely from home after telling his employers that he was caring for his mother, who lived with him in east London.
His mother had dementia and was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023. However, rather than reduce his workload to care for her, he continued taking on additional jobs.
Chowdhury told the court that he accepted multiple positions because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing employment insecurity in the past.
He said he had been made redundant from a job at the Department for Education in 2013 and was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Explaining his actions, he said he had not been thinking clearly when applying for jobs “because of my stress, distress and trauma and due to my panic at the time”.
However, prosecuting barrister Lucy Organ accused him of lying during the trial.
“He’s lied to you in evidence, he’s lied to you under oath, which demonstrates the level of deceit he has descended to,” she told the jury.
The court also heard from some of Chowdhury’s former managers about his performance at work.
Dan McCartney, who managed him at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said he had to “effectively tell him what to do the whole time”.
McCartney said Chowdhury frequently switched off his camera during video calls, citing technical problems, and that the situation continued for four to five months.
However, because he was not subjected to formal performance measures at the department, Chowdhury was offered a permanent position and remained there for two years.
Prosecutors also alleged that he used sick notes to manage his overlapping work commitments.
In March 2023, he was on sick leave from four organisations but continued working at the Home Office without informing the department that he was ill.
His line manager at the UK Health Security Agency, Aleesha Adams, also testified about a video call she arranged with him in May 2023, after he had been off sick for three months.
Adams said she intended to discuss a plan for his return to work but became suspicious when he repeatedly coughed and waved tissues towards the camera at the beginning of the meeting.
She alleged that Chowdhury had applied white make-up to his face to make himself appear ill, adding that it began coming off his forehead as the meeting progressed.
“He was sweating, it was like rubbing off so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck,” she told the jury.
Chowdhury denied the allegation, describing it as a smear and insisting that he had not worn make-up.
Adams further told the court that, after the meeting, she discovered he had joined the video call using an email address belonging to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
When challenged, he blamed the incident on a technical error.
“I believed he was lying,” Adams told the jury, adding that she escalated her concerns to senior officials at the agency.
However, Chowdhury’s activities continued for several more months until he left the civil service in September 2023.
He was eventually identified in 2024 through the government’s National Fraud Initiative, which conducts checks of civil service databases, including payroll records, every two years to detect anomalies.
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