A UK civil servant who secretly held 5 full-time government jobs simultaneously and earned hundreds of thousands of pounds has been found guilty of fraud, the BBC reported.
Adams told the jury that during the call she noticed that he appeared to be wearing white make-up to look ill, the BBC reported. He also did not inform his employers about his other jobs after securing the positions. However, as the meeting progressed, the make-up appeared to rub off his forehead, revealing darker skin underneath.
Kashim Chowdhury, from east London, was found guilty of nine counts of fraud after a jury at Southwark Crown Court deliberated for around 7 hours. Prosecutors said Chowdhury exploited remote-working arrangements to conceal his multiple jobs, which overlapped between 2020 and 2023. During this period, the 56-year-old held 8 full-time public sector roles at different times, earning around £350,000 in total. In March 2023, he was reportedly on sick leave from 4 organisations but continued working at the Home Office without informing them that he was unwell.
The verdicts included eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failing to disclose information, according to a report by the BBC. Chowdhury provided inaccurate information about his employment status on job application forms and failed to disclose that he was already working as a civil servant, according to the prosecution. Prosecutors said Chowdhury used sick notes to manage his workload. She said that Chowdhury had been coughing and waving tissues in front of the camera.
But Chowdhury’s fraudulent behaviour went on for several more months until he left the civil service in September 2023. He was finally caught in 2024 by the government’s National Fraud Initiative, which conducts searches of civil service databases such as payroll every two years to look for anomalies. He had previously been made redundant from a role at the Department for Education in 2013 and said he was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing insecure employment in the past, during the trial, Chowdhury said he had taken on several jobs. He told the court that 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”.
