Civil servant convicted after secretly holding five public sector jobs at once
Kashim Chowdhury has been found guilty of nine counts of fraud after secretly holding multiple public sector jobs on full-time salaries while concealing the overlap from employers. The case centred on a pattern of sustained deception that allowed him to draw more than £284,000 in taxpayers’ money unlawfully, even as his total earnings across overlapping roles rose to £350,000 between 2020 and 2023.
The jury returned unanimous verdicts after seven hours of deliberation: eight counts of fraud by false representation and one count of fraud by failing to disclose. In court, the conduct was described as deliberate and intentional dishonesty, not a lapse in paperwork or a one-off omission. The judge said Chowdhury faced a “very significant custodial sentence” and refused bail, citing both the seriousness of the offence and concern for his wellbeing.
The case is not about a single payroll error. It is about a system of false declarations, repeated concealment, and the exploitation of remote working arrangements that made sustained deception easier to maintain.
Repeated false declarations across government departments
Chowdhury, from east London, held eight full-time public sector roles that overlapped over three years. In the spring of 2023 alone, he had five government jobs running at the same time, including posts at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Health Security Agency, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office.
During that period, he was contracted to work 183 hours a week — a figure that exceeds the number of hours in seven days. The scale of the overlap alone made the arrangement impossible to reconcile with ordinary full-time employment.
The prosecution said application forms contained inaccurate information about his employment status and failed to disclose that he was already working for government departments. Once the roles were secured, he did not tell employers that he was simultaneously working elsewhere. That pattern of nondisclosure formed the basis of the fraud counts heard by the jury.
A central feature of the case was how remote work allowed the deception to continue. Chowdhury was allowed to work entirely from home after saying he was caring for his mother, who lived with him in east London and had dementia. She was later diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2023.
Sick leave, video calls and the unraveling of the deception
The overlap became harder to sustain as his workload collided with sickness absence. In March 2023, he was on sick leave from four of the organisations he worked for, yet he kept working at the Home Office and did not disclose his illness there. The prosecution argued that sick notes were used to manage an impossible schedule rather than to reflect genuine incapacity.
A telling moment came during a video call in May 2023 with his UK Health Security Agency line manager, Aleesha Adams. She had arranged the meeting after he had been off sick for three months and wanted a plan for his return. Adams told the court that he coughed repeatedly, waved tissues towards the camera and appeared to be wearing white make-up to look ill. As the meeting progressed, she said the make-up began to rub off his forehead and neck.
Chowdhury denied wearing make-up and said the allegation was false. He also denied any wrongdoing when Adams later noticed that he had logged into the call using a Defra email address. The explanation given at the time was a technical error, but suspicion had already taken root. Adams told the jury she believed he was lying and escalated her concerns through the UKHSA chain of command.
One sentence captured the turning point in the prosecution narrative: his deception stopped being plausible once his own systems, emails and absences began to overlap in public view.
Trust, supervision and the limits of remote oversight
At Defra, manager Dan McCartney described a poor performance record and said he had to “effectively tell him what to do the whole time.” He also said Chowdhury often switched off his camera during video calls, blaming technical problems for months at a time. Even so, because he was not subject to formal performance measures, he remained in the post long enough to secure a permanent job and stay there for two years.
That detail matters because it reveals how weak supervision can let fraud persist. In jobs built around trust, the absence of structured oversight can be as damaging as active collusion. Once an employee learns that poor responsiveness, camera-off meetings and vague explanations are tolerated, the threshold for continued concealment drops sharply.
Sarah Melo, the specialist prosecutor at the CPS Serious Economic Organised Crime and International Directorate, called it “sustained and deliberate dishonesty” and said Chowdhury knew he could not legitimately hold multiple full-time positions at the same time, yet continued to conceal what he was doing. Defra said he had “abused the trust placed in him as a public servant” and would use all available avenues to recover the proceeds of his offending.
The National Fraud Initiative flagged suspected fraud to Defra in 2023. That triggered an investigation by the department’s own team, followed by arrest and interview under caution in July 2023. He was dismissed from the civil service in September that year.
Personal distress, PTSD and the court’s rejection of the defence
Chowdhury told the jury he had taken on so many roles because he feared losing his livelihood after years of insecure employment. He said he had been made redundant from a Department for Education role in 2013 and was later diagnosed with PTSD. He also said he was not thinking clearly when applying for jobs because of stress, distress, trauma and panic.
The prosecution rejected that account, and Lucy Organ told the jury that he had lied in evidence and under oath, showing the depth of deceit in the case. The verdicts indicate that jurors accepted the prosecution’s version: this was not a man overwhelmed by circumstance, but one who systematically misrepresented his status to secure income from several public employers at once.
The criminal case has also collided with a separate family dispute. Chowdhury has been accused by siblings of bullying their mother into increasing his share of the family home days before she died. In a High Court claim, they allege he exerted undue influence on Faijun Nessa to sign documents that would leave him half of the east London property, valued at £2.1 million. They say she was desperately unwell, nearly blind and unable to speak English, and that the documents were not translated into Bengali at the time. Chowdhury denies those claims, and that case continues.
The fraud conviction now moves the focus back to sentencing, recovery of funds and the broader question of how public institutions verify honesty when work is remote, fragmented and easy to disguise. The court has already signaled the likely scale of punishment; what remains unresolved is how much of the lost money can be traced and recovered.