Kashim Chowdhury, Digi Mart USA News (London, United Kingdom): A civil servant who secretly held multiple public sector jobs on full-time salaries has been found guilty of nine counts of fraud. Kashim Chowdhury, from east London, had five government jobs that overlapped in the spring of 2023, and he fraudulently earned more than £284,000 of taxpayers’ money.
The prosecution accused the 56-year-old of “deliberate, intentional dishonesty” and of “exploiting the system.” After seven hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously found Chowdhury guilty of eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by a failure to disclose.
The judge said Chowdhury faced a “very significant custodial sentence” and refused bail because of the seriousness of the crime and for Chowdhury’s own wellbeing. Between 2020 and 2023, Chowdhury held eight full-time public sector roles that overlapped and earned him £350,000 in total.
The prosecution told the court that on application forms he provided inaccurate information about his employment status and failed to disclose to government departments that he was already a civil servant. Once he secured the roles, he did not tell his employers he was working elsewhere.
He was allowed to work entirely from home because he told his employers he was caring for his mother, with whom he lived in east London. She had dementia and was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023.
Rather than reduce his workload to look after her, he kept taking on new jobs.
In the spring of 2023, when his mother was a few months from death, he held jobs at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. During this period he was contracted to work 183 hours a week, more than the number of hours that exist in seven days.
Chowdhury said he had taken on so many roles because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing insecure employment in the past. He was made redundant from a job at the Department for Education in 2013 and was given a diagnosis of PTSD.
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, prosecution barrister Lucy Organ told the jury: “He’s lied to you in evidence, he’s lied to you under oath, which demonstrates the level of deceit he has descended to.” A succession of his managers told the court about his poor performance. Dan McCartney, who managed Chowdhury at Defra, said he had to “effectively tell him what to do the whole time.”
McCartney said that during video calls Chowdhury kept his camera switched off, blaming technical problems, and that this continued for four to five months. Because Chowdhury was not subject to any formal performance measures at Defra, he was given a permanent job and remained there for two years.
The prosecution argued that he used sick notes to cope with his impossible schedule. In March 2023, he was on sick leave from four of the organisations he worked for, but he kept working at the Home Office and did not tell them he was ill.
His line manager at the UKHSA, Aleesha Adams, organised a video call with him in May 2023, by which point he had been off sick for three months.
Adams told the jury that at the start of the call he was coughing a lot and waving tissues up to the camera, and that he had been wearing white make-up to appear ill. She said the make-up began coming off his forehead as the meeting went on.
Chowdhury told the jury this was a smear and that he had not been wearing make-up.
After the call, Adams discovered he had logged in using a Defra email address. When she challenged him, he blamed a technical error.
“I believed he was lying,” she told the jury, and she escalated her concerns within the UKHSA. His fraudulent behaviour continued 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 searches civil service databases such as payroll every two years for anomalies.
