NHS Impostor Ordered to Repay £400K or Face More Jail Time
Imagine discovering that the psychiatrist responsible for diagnosing and treating hundreds of vulnerable patients in the UK over two decades wasn’t even a qualified doctor. That’s the reality of the astonishing case of Zholia Alemi—a name that has now become synonymous with one of the NHS’s most alarming breaches of trust.
Zholia Alemi, 63, originally from Iran, built an entire medical career in the UK based on a lie. In the 1990s, she was living in New Zealand where she attempted—but failed—to complete her medical degree at the University of Auckland. When denied a resit, she didn’t walk away. Instead, she forged a degree certificate and a letter of verification—ironically misspelling the word "verify" in the process—and used these fake documents to register with the General Medical Council (GMC). Unbelievably, her falsified paperwork passed through GMC checks, allowing her to work as a psychiatrist in the NHS for over 20 years.
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Alemi earned more than £1.3 million during this time. But the truth eventually caught up with her. In 2023, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for 20 offences including forgery and fraud. Now, the Crown Prosecution Service has gone further—ordering her to repay £406,624 or face an additional two and a half years in jail.
This isn’t Alemi’s first brush with serious fraud. In 2018, she was also convicted for forging the will of an 84-year-old patient in a calculated attempt to inherit a bungalow and £300,000. That conviction prompted a wider review, with the GMC issuing a public apology for its failure to verify her qualifications properly back in the 1990s. They subsequently launched a review of nearly 3,000 foreign doctors who were licensed under similar circumstances.
The case has not only exposed major loopholes in the UK’s medical registration system—particularly old legislation that allowed Commonwealth graduates like Alemi to register without sitting for the PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessment Board) exam—but has also raised serious concerns about patient safety. Alemi, unqualified and untrained, was responsible for the care of hundreds, potentially thousands, of patients.
As Adrian Foster of the CPS put it, Alemi “had little regard for patient welfare” and “cheated the public purse.” Her actions risked lives and cost the NHS dearly. The £400,000 repayment order is intended to recover at least part of the money wrongly earned, but the damage to public trust may take much longer to repair.
It’s a sobering reminder: qualifications matter, and systems designed to protect us must never be taken for granted.
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