NHS doctor who faked degree told to pay £400k or face more jail time

A woman who worked as an NHS psychiatrist for more than 20 years after she got the job with a fake qualification has been ordered to pay back more than £400,000 or face more jail time.

Zholia Alemi, of Burnley, worked across the UK after forging a degree certificate from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

The 62-year-old denied 20 offences including forgery but was jailed for seven years after being convicted by jury at Manchester Crown Court in 2023.

A Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) spokesman said she had been ordered by a judge to pay back £406,624 in compensation to the NHS or face two-and-a-half more years in prison after she “cheated the public purse”.

Alemi was born in Iran but in the early 1990s was in Auckland, where she failed to complete the bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery degree required to practise as a doctor and was refused permission to resit.

She forged a degree certificate and a letter of verification in 1995, with the word verify misspelt, the court heard.

Despite that they were both accepted as evidence by the General Medical Council (GMC) who registered her as a doctor.

The trial heard Alemi had earned more than £1.3m in wages from the NHS but the CPS said she never held the medical qualifications necessary to undertake these roles.

Adrian Foster, of the CPS, said: “We have robustly pursued the proceeds of crime with NHS Counter Fraud Authority and have identified all the assets that she has available to pay her order.

He said: “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.”

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Hilary Manley called for an inquiry into how the GMC registered her as a doctor when the documents she submitted were “clearly false”.

The court was also told Alemi, who previously lived in High Harrington, Cumbria, had been jailed for five years after being convicted of three fraud offences in 2018.

Those offences related to the forging of the will of an 84-year-old, which would have seen her inherit the woman’s Keswick bungalow and £300,000.

Following Alemi’s 2018 conviction, the GMC apologised for its “inadequate” checks in the 1990s and began an urgent check of about 3,000 foreign doctors working in the UK.