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A jury in London found guilty of fraud a minor official who, taking advantage of the benefits of working from home, spent four years working as an employee of eight departments, five of them simultaneously.
Now east Londoner Kashim Chowdhury, 56, was paid full time by eight departments between 2020 and 2023. In each of them, the salary was relatively modest, but due to “part-time work,” as the investigation considered, he fraudulently received more than 284 thousand pounds (more than 380 thousand dollars at the current exchange rate).
The jury deliberated for seven hours and ultimately found Chowdhury guilty of nine counts, all related to some form of fraud.
A specific sentence has not yet been handed down, but the judge has already said that Chowdhury will face a “very significant” sentence.
According to the investigation, Kashim Chowdhury got a second job for the first time in 2021, concealing the presence of the first one. The first place of employment was the London Borough Council of Tower Hamlets, the second was the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Life.
At that time, Covid lockdowns were still introduced from time to time, but Chowdhury also received personal permission to work only from home, since he stated that he needed to care for his sick mother. She was indeed seriously ill and died in 2023.
At the beginning of 2022, Chowdhury took a third job, at the district office of the National Health Foundation. He was listed there for only a short time, but in the second half of the same year he got a job in three more departments.
The overall balance of dismissals and new jobs of the enterprising official was such that at the end of 2022 he was listed in four departments, and in the spring of 2023 he reached a maximum of five full positions in different institutions.
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In addition to the three departments named, he eventually worked for the Department of Health, the Department of Business and Trade, the Department of Home Affairs, the Public Health Agency and the Food Standards Agency.
At its peak, he theoretically worked 183 hours per week. As you know, there are 168 hours in a week.
According to the investigation, in order to somehow cope with such a schedule, he often called in sick. So, in March 2023, he was listed as sick in four places at the same time, and only in the fifth, at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, did he continue to work.
In court, Chowdhury explained that he collected so many jobs because after his dismissal from the Ministry of Education in 2013, he was afraid of being left without a livelihood, which is why he was constantly in a state of stress.
The prosecution responded to this by saying that Choudhury constantly lies, including in court.
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Several of Chowdhury's bosses told the court that he worked frankly poorly.
His boss at the Department of the Environment, Dan McCartney, said he constantly had to prod Chowdhury. During communication sessions, he always kept the camera turned off and claimed that it was broken.
However, no formal serious claims were made against Chowdhury, and he remained in this ministry for two years.
Chowdhury's immediate supervisor at the Public Health Agency, Alisha Adams, told the court that by May 2023, her subordinate had been out sick for three consecutive months and she decided to interview him via video to make a plan for his return to work.
According to Adams, at the beginning of the conversation, Chowdhury coughed a lot and looked very pale, but then he began to sweat, and the powder he had put on to look sick began to come off his forehead and face along with sweat.
Chowdhury said that this was slander, and he did not apply any powder to his forehead.
Adams became convinced that Chowdhury was lying and shared this conviction with his superiors, but the matter never came to a point of forced dismissal - he himself left in September 2023.
He was exposed only in 2024 during a twice-yearly audit of employee lists, payroll records and other documents of government agencies.
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