A Whitechapel man has been convicted of nine counts of fraud after holding multiple full-time public-sector jobs at the same time while concealing his other employment.
Kashim Chowdhury, 56, was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court on 9 November following a two-week trial. The Crown Prosecution Service said he had repeatedly applied for positions with government departments and public bodies between 2020 and 2023 without disclosing that he already had full-time work.
The jury found him guilty of eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failing to disclose information. Sentencing was yet to be fixed when prosecutors announced the verdict.
Contracts added up to more than a week
Prosecutors said Chowdhury held five full-time jobs between 20 March and 31 May 2023, with contracts requiring a combined 183 hours of work a week. That is 15 hours more than the 168 hours in a seven-day week. The figure describes the contractual hours across the jobs, not a claim that he actually worked for 183 hours.
His employment included full-time positions with Tower Hamlets Council and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, known as Defra. The prosecution service said he held those two jobs for more than a year before taking another full-time post with an east London NHS trust.
Prosecutors also listed positions with the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Health Security Agency, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. Those positions were not all necessarily held at the same time.
Across eight overlapping full-time public-sector roles between 2020 and 2023, Chowdhury received £350,000 in total. More than £284,000 was described as fraudulently earned. The total earnings figure should not be treated as a finding that the whole amount was a proven loss caused by fraud.
What the prosecution established
The case centred on false representations and concealment, rather than simply the fact that Chowdhury had more than one job. The prosecution service said his applications included declarations that the information he supplied was complete and true. It said he gave misleading information about his employment status and history while seeking further roles.
Prosecutors said they had proved that he repeatedly accepted full-time positions while presenting himself as able to carry out those jobs at the same time. They said there was no evidence that he had disclosed his employment status to his employers.
Chowdhury worked remotely and told employers that he needed to do so to care for his mother, the prosecution service said. In May 2023, a UK Health Security Agency manager and a human resources worker held a video meeting with him about long-term sickness in that role. The manager noticed he had used a Defra email address for the meeting. When challenged, Chowdhury said it was a technical problem.
The prosecution service said a check by the National Fraud Initiative identified that Chowdhury was employed by two government departments simultaneously. Defra’s counter-fraud team investigated, while a financial investigator carried out separate inquiries into the benefit from the offending.
Verdict and next steps
Chowdhury told the court that he had taken on the roles because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing insecure employment. The jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts after seven hours of deliberation.
Prosecutors said specialists would seek to recover the proceeds of the fraud. That is a proposed recovery process, not a statement that a particular sum has already been recovered. A sentencing date was still to be set in the prosecution announcement.
