Civil servant who juggled five jobs found guilty of fraud

Chowdhury said 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”.

But the 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.”

A succession of his managers told the court about his poor performance. Especially damning was the evidence given by Dan McCartney who managed Chowdhury at Defra.

He said he had to “effectively tell him what to do the whole time”. McCartney said that during video calls Chowdhury had his camera switched off blaming technical problems. McCartney said this went on for four to five months.

But McCartney said that because Chowdhury was not subject to any formal performance measures at Defra, he was given a permanent job and remained there for two years.

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 organisations 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 (UKHSA), Aleesha Adams, organised a video call with him in May 2023. By this point he’d been off sick for three months and she wanted to make a plan to get him back to work.

She told the jury that at the start of the call he was coughing a lot and waving tissues up to the camera. She also told the jury that he had been wearing white make-up to try to look ill.

Adams told the court that as the meeting went on the make-up started coming off his forehead. ”He was sweating, it was like rubbing off so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck.”

Chowdhury told the jury this was a smear and that he had not been wearing make-up.

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.

But his fraudulent behaviour 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.