A bogus psychiatrist who practised in the NHS for 22 years with a fake degree has been jailed, as a judge criticised medical authorities for an “abject failure of scrutiny”.
Zholia Alemi was ordered to serve seven years in prison after being found guilty of a “deliberate and wicked deception” that allowed her to treat hundreds of patients across Britain.
Alemi, who is believed to be 60, earned £1.3m in wages after forging the degree certificate she used to register with the General Medical Council (GMC) in 1995.
Sentencing her on Tuesday, Judge Hilary Manley 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 raised concerns about evidence from a GMC representative during the trial in which the court was told there was a high level of scrutiny of documents. She said the court was “troubled” by the apparent contradiction over a statement from the GMC that said documents in the 1990s were not subject to the “rigorous scrutiny” now in place.
Manley called for the GMC to conduct a “thorough, open, transparent” inquiry into how the defendant was able to submit “such clearly false documents” and why it took a journalist rather than a professional governing body to uncover the truth.
She said Alemi, who was able to detain patients against their will and prescribe powerful drugs, moved around the UK 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 living in Auckland, New Zealand, in the early 1990s when she failed to complete a medical degree and was refused permission to resit. She then moved to the UK and used a forged degree certificate and letter of verification to register with the GMC.
Alemi was convicted 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.
After her conviction, the journalist Phil Coleman, chief reporter for Cumbrian Newspapers, investigated Alemi’s background and found she had never completed her qualification, the court was told.
Stables said court proceedings had “come about as a direct result of the persistence of Mr Coleman’s investigative journalism”.
Alemi, from Burnley, was convicted 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 after a four-week trial.
The GMC said it was sorry that Alemi was able to join its register in the 1990s but that its processes were now “far stronger”. It 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.”
