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A British civil servant who secretly held multiple government jobs simultaneously and fraudulently earned more than £284,000 in taxpayers’ money has been found guilty of nine counts of fraud.
Kashim Chowdhury, 56, from east London, was convicted after a jury found him guilty of eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failing to disclose information.
According to a BBC report published on Monday, the jury reached its unanimous verdict after seven hours of deliberation.
Chowdhury held five government jobs at the same time in the spring of 2023, although he had secured eight overlapping full-time public sector roles between 2020 and 2023, earning a total of £350,000.
The prosecution accused him of “deliberate, intentional dishonesty” and “exploiting the system”.
The court heard that Chowdhury provided inaccurate information about his employment status on job application forms and failed to disclose to government departments that he was already employed elsewhere.
After securing the positions, he also failed to inform his employers that he was working for other organisations.
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.
During the spring of 2023, he was contracted to work 183 hours weekly, exceeding the total number of hours in a seven-day week.
The report said Chowdhury was allowed to work entirely from home after telling his employers that he was caring for his mother, with whom he lived 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 roles because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing insecure employment 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 evidence from several of Chowdhury’s former managers about his performance at work.
One of them, 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 told the court that 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.
The prosecution 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 told the court about a video call she arranged with him in May 2023, after he had been off sick for three months.
Adams said she wanted to discuss a plan for his return to work.
She told the jury that Chowdhury was coughing repeatedly and waving tissues towards the camera at the beginning of the meeting.
She further alleged that he had applied white make-up to his face to make himself appear ill.
According to Adams, the make-up 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 court.
Chowdhury denied the allegation, describing it as a smear and insisting that he had not worn make-up.
After the meeting, Adams discovered that 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.
Adams said she became suspicious and escalated her concerns to senior officials at the agency.
“I believed he was lying,” she told the jury.
However, his activities continued for several more months until he left the civil service in September 2023.
Chowdhury 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 identify anomalies.
