// BBC BUSINESS NEWS — FINANZA
How a civil servant got away with juggling five jobs for so long
Kashim Chowdhury fraudulently earned more than £284,000 of taxpayers' money
Aleesha Adams joined a video call with Kashim Chowdhury in May 2023.
He'd been on sick leave from his job at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) for nearly three months and Adams, his line manager, wanted to put a plan in action to ease him back into work.
At the start of the call, Chowdhury was coughing and waving tissues up to the camera in an attempt to show how ill he was. But what really caught Adams' attention was how pale he looked.
She noticed white powder had started separating from his forehead. "He was sweating, it was like rubbing off, so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck," she told his trial.
She claimed he was wearing white make-up to look sick. Something he denied in court.
Little did she know UKHSA was not Chowdhury's only employer.
That month, he was also being paid to work full-time for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. He was contracted to work 183 hours a week – more than the number of hours in seven days. He fraudulently earned more than £284,000 of taxpayers' money.
In total, he had eight overlapping full-time public-sector jobs between 2020 and 2023. During that time, this relatively junior civil servant was paid £350,000.
Soon after her call with Chowdhury, Adams discovered that he had logged into the call using a Defra email address. When she challenged him about it, he blamed it on a technical error. She told the jury at his trial at Southwark Crown Court: "I believed he was lying." She escalated her concerns up the chain.