A civil servant who secretly held five overlapping full-time government jobs has been found guilty of fraud after earning more than £284,000 from taxpayers.
Kashim Chowdhury, 56, of east London, was convicted of nine counts after a trial that examined how he concealed simultaneous public-sector employment and continued taking on new roles while telling employers he was caring for his terminally ill mother.
The jury unanimously found him guilty of eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failure to disclose after seven hours of deliberation. The judge said Chowdhury faced a “very significant custodial sentence” and refused bail because of the seriousness of the offense and for Chowdhury’s own wellbeing.
The prosecution accused the 56-year-old of “deliberate, intentional dishonesty” and of “exploiting the system.” Sarah Melo, a specialist prosecutor at the CPS Serious Economic Organised Crime and International Directorate, said: “This was sustained and deliberate dishonesty. He knew he could not legitimately hold multiple full-time positions at the same time, but continued to conceal what he was doing.”
A Defra spokesperson said Chowdhury “abused the trust placed in him as a public servant” and added that the department would use all available avenues to recover the proceeds of his offending.
Five overlapping roles
Chowdhury had five government jobs that overlapped in spring 2023, the period at the heart of the fraud case. The five overlapping jobs generated more than £284,000. Between 2020 and 2023, he held eight full-time public-sector roles that overlapped and earned him £350,000 in total.
In spring 2023, when his mother was a few months away from death, his roles included positions at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC); the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA); the Department for Business and Trade (DBT); the Food Standards Agency (FSA); and the Home Office. Court evidence identified roles at six government organizations during that period, while prosecutors said he held five overlapping government jobs. He was contracted to work 183 hours a week, more than the number of hours in seven days.
Prosecutors said application forms provided inaccurate information about his employment status and failed to disclose 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 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.
Defense cites trauma and job insecurity
Chowdhury told the jury 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.”
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.”
Managers described poor performance
A succession of 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.” During video calls, Chowdhury had his camera switched off and blamed technical problems, McCartney said, adding that this went on for four to five months. Because Chowdhury was not subject to formal performance measures at Defra, he was given a permanent job and remained there for two years, McCartney told the court.
Sick leave and a video call
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 organizations he worked for. But he kept working at the Home Office and did not tell them he was ill.
His line manager at the UK Health Security Agency, Aleesha Adams, organized a video call with him in May 2023. By that point he had been off sick for three months, and she wanted to make a plan to get him back to work. Adams told the jury that at the start of the call he was coughing a lot and waving tissues up to the camera. She also said he had been wearing white makeup to try to look ill. As the meeting went on, the makeup started coming off his forehead. “He was sweating, it was like rubbing off so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck,” she told the court.
Chowdhury told the jury this was a smear and that he had not been wearing makeup.
After the call, Adams discovered that he had logged into the call using a Defra email address. When she challenged him about it, he blamed a technical error. Adams grew suspicious. “I believed he was lying,” she told the jury. She escalated her concerns up the chain at the UKHSA. His fraudulent behavior 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.
Civil claim over family home
Chowdhury has also been accused by his siblings of bullying their mother into increasing his share of the family home days before she died. In a case at the High Court, Chowdhury’s two brothers and sister allege that he put “undue influence” on Faijun Nessa to sign documents that meant he would inherit half of her home. The four-storey, six-bedroom home in east London has been valued at £2.1 million.
His siblings say their mother could not have understood what she was signing because she was “desperately unwell.” In January 2023, she was given a terminal diagnosis of stage four metastatic colorectal cancer. The claimants also allege that Mrs Nessa, who was nearly blind and could not speak English, was unaware of what she was signing because the documents were not translated into her native Bengali at the time they were signed.
Kashim Chowdhury denies the claims. That case is ongoing.