Kashim Chowdhury was found guilty on Monday of nine counts of fraud after secretly holding overlapping full-time public-sector jobs for years, a case that exposed how one civil servant could draw pay from several government posts at once. He had been working until September 2023, when he left the Civil Service, but the scale of the mismatch between the jobs he held and the hours he was contracted to work finally caught up with him.
The numbers alone show why this case has landed hard. In May 2023, Chowdhury was contracted to work 183 hours a week while he was on sick leave from the UK Health Security Agency for nearly three months and still being paid by Defra, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. A seven-day week has 168 hours in total, so the contract demanded 15 hours more than the week contained, before any sleep, travel or the demands of another job were counted. Over the period between 2020 and 2023, he had eight overlapping full-time public-sector jobs and was paid £350,000, of which more than £284,000 was judged to have been fraudulently earned.
The case turned in part on a video call in May 2023, when Aleesha Adams, his line manager, said he looked pale and believed he was wearing white make-up to appear sick. Chowdhury denied that in court. Soon after the call, Adams found that he had logged in using a Defra email address, and when she challenged him he blamed a technical error. She then escalated her concerns up the chain and later told the jury at Southwark Crown Court: “I believed he was lying.”
That clash went to the heart of the case. Chowdhury said he had taken on so many roles because he feared losing his livelihood after insecure employment, saying he had been forced out of a job at the Department for Education in 2013 and that stress, distress and trauma had left him unable to think clearly when he applied for roles. Prosecutors said his conduct was deliberate and intentional dishonesty, and that he had exploited the system while drawing public money from more than one department at the same time.
He was caught in 2024 by the government’s National Fraud Initiative, which searches Civil Service databases every two years for anomalies, including payroll mismatches. Chowdhury, 56, arrived each day at court alone and carried two plastic carrier bags, and the judge said he now faced a “very substantial custodial sentence”. The unanswered question is not whether the fraud happened. It is how the checks were failed long enough for eight full-time roles to sit side by side until the National Fraud Initiative finally pulled the thread.
