A Kiwi doctor who faked her degree was able to practise for 20 years because of a watchdog’s “abject failure of scrutiny”, a UK court was told.
Zholia Alemi was jailed for seven years on Tuesday after being found guilty of using a forged medical degree certificate to secure a number of jobs in the UK’s National Health Service over two decades.
The bogus psychiatrist was only exposed when a carer reported concerns about her attempts to defraud an elderly patient in 2016, leading to her conviction for three fraud offences at Carlisle Crown Court.
Phil Coleman, chief reporter for the News and Star, went on to discover that Alemi had never completed her medical degree at the University of Auckland, as she had claimed, and a police investigation was subsequently launched.
Sentencing her this week, Judge Hilary Manley criticised the General Medical Council (GMC) for an “abject failure of scrutiny”, and said the offences “strike so very deeply at the heart of healthcare provisions in this country”.
She added: “That the degree certificate and supporting letter were accepted by the GMC represents an abject failure of scrutiny.
“You benefited from that failure and of course from your own deliberate and calculated dishonesty.”
The judge said the court was “troubled” by an apparent contradiction over a statement from the GMC which said documents in the 1990s were not subject to the “rigorous scrutiny” now in place, and called for the watchdog to conduct a “thorough, open, transparent” inquiry into how Alemi could submit such “clearly false documents”, as well as why it took a journalist rather than a professional governing body to expose the truth.
Judge Manley said Alemi, who was able to detain patients against their will and prescribe powerful drugs, moved around the country to different posts to ensure “the finger of suspicion” did not point at her.
Christopher Stables KC, prosecuting, said Alemi was born in Iran but was in Auckland by the early 1990s, where she failed to complete the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree required to practise as a doctor and was refused permission to re-sit.
In 1995, in the UK, she forged a degree certificate and letter of verification, he said.
“Those forged documents were used by the defendant and sent to the GMC in the UK in support of her application for registration as a doctor,” Stables added.
The court heard that she was registered and worked “more or less continuously” for both NHS trusts and private providers across the UK in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, earning an estimated £1.3 million ($2.5m now).
Stables described Alemi as an “accomplished forger”, adding that it was unclear how old Alemi actually is, since documents showed three different dates of birth for her, giving a possible age range from 55 to 60.
The court heard that she was convicted at Carlisle Crown Court in 2018 for three fraud offences and a count of theft, after trying to forge the will and powers of attorney of an elderly patient.
Following her conviction, the News and Star’s Coleman made inquiries into her background and found that she had never completed her qualification, the court was told.
Stables added that the court proceedings had been a “direct result” of the “persistence” of Coleman’s journalism.
Alemi’s lawyer Francis Fitzgibbons KC said: “Prison for someone with her characteristics is particularly onerous.”
Alemi was convicted after a four-week trial of 13 counts of fraud, three counts of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception, two counts of forgery and two counts of using a false instrument.
The court heard from Cumbria Police that there had been a “treasure trove” of forgery items at Alemi’s Northern Ireland home address, such as blank qualification certificates.
Detective Superintendent Matt Scott said she had been “obstructive” and on occasion “arrogant” while being interviewed, denying wrongdoing throughout.
“My view, and it’s my own personal view, is that Alemi’s lived a lie since she left Iran, where she originally came from,” he said.
“I also think that to get to the bottom of somebody who’s lived a lie for their entire life may be near impossible, especially when - again in my personal view - Alemi is somebody who has come to believe her own lie and has lived that lie for so long.”
Una Lane, director of registration and revalidation at the GMC, said: “We are very sorry that Zholia Alemi was able to join our medical register in the 1990s, based on fraudulent documentation, and for any risk arising to patients as a result.
“Our processes are far stronger now, with rigorous testing in place to make sure those joining the register are fit to work in the UK,” Lane said.
“It is clear that in this case the steps taken almost three decades ago were inadequate. We are confident that, 27 years on, our systems are robust.
“Patients deserve good care from appropriately qualified professionals and place a great deal of trust in doctors. To exploit that trust and the respected name of the profession is abhorrent.”