Zholia Alemi was sentenced to 7 years in jail after being found guilty of 13 counts of fraud and two counts of using material to falsify medical qualifications, among other charges
A fake doctor who forged her medical qualifications in order to fraudulently work as a hospital psychiatrist has been ordered to pay back £406,624 to the NHS or face spending two and half more years in prison.
Zholia Alemi, 62, worked as a psychiatrist all over the UK for more than 20 years, earning a total sum of over £1million after she falsely claimed to have qualified at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She was later found to have forged the degree certificate and letter of verification she used to register with the General Medical Council in 1995.
As a result, she did not have to sit and pass the Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board exam, which is usually required of doctors who qualified abroad. A judge today determined Alemi’s total criminal benefit was £1,204,819.30 and issued a confiscation order against her for £406,624.
Adrian Foster, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “We have robustly pursued the proceeds of crime with Cumbria Police and have identified all the assets that she has available to pay her order. Alemi had little regard for patient welfare.
“She used forged New Zealand medical qualifications to obtain employment as an NHS psychiatrist for 20 years. In doing so, she must have treated hundreds of patients when she was unqualified to do so, potentially putting those patients at risk.
“Her fraudulent actions also enabled her to dishonestly earn income and benefits more than £1million, to which she was not entitled. She cheated the public purse and £406,624 will be paid in compensation to the NHS.”
Alemi, of Burnley, Lancs, was previously sentenced to seven years in jail in February 2023 after being found guilty of 13 counts of fraud, two counts of forgery, three counts of deception and two counts of using material to falsify medical qualifications at Manchester Crown Court.
The court heard she was born in Iran, but was in Auckland in the early 1990s when she failed to complete her degree to practise as a doctor. She went on to work “more or less continuously” for both the NHS and private providers across the UK before her lies began to catch up with her after she was convicted of trying to forge the will of an elderly patient in Cumbria in 2018.
Phil Coleman, chief reporter for Cumbrian Newspapers, subsequently made inquiries into Alemi’s background and discovered she had never completed her qualification. It was the “persistence” of Mr Coleman’s investigative journalism that led to court proceedings, the court heard.
A judge later accused the General Medical Council of an “abject failure of scrutiny” and called for an inquiry into how they fell for “clearly false” papers, which included a forged letter of verification with misspelt words, including verify.