ZHOLIA Alemi’s 22-year NHS career ended in disgrace.

Found guilty of attempting to forge the will of an elderly Keswick widow to inherit her £1.3m estate, 'consultant psychiatrist' Zholia Alemi stood silently in the dock at Carlisle Crown Court, her face expressionless as she waited for her punishment.

It was October 18, 2018, and a jury at Carlisle Crown Court had delivered their damning judgement: that Alemi was a cheat and a liar.

Over the previous week, I had listened intently as witnesses exposed how the 56-year-old doctor insinuated herself into the life of a vulnerable 84-year-old widow, who was struggling with grief after the death of her husband.

With no immediate relatives, Gillian Belham was a wealthy woman. But she had struggled the cope in the months after her husband died, the court heard.

Almost all the professionals who were helping Mrs Belham saw her saw her as an elderly woman in need of help and support. Alemi – already a wealthy woman thanks to more than two decades of well-paid work in the NHS - saw an opportunity.

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After discharging the pensioner from the Workington dementia service where she first met Mrs Belham, Alemi began befriending her – helping with her shopping, helping the pensioner – a former Bank of England clerk - with her finances,

It was the disappearance of a watch collection from Mrs Belham’s home that triggered a police investigation – and ultimately the shocking discovery that Alemi has forged the pensioner’s will, redrafting it so she and her family were the chief beneficiaries.

Significantly, Alemi chose not to give evidence in her Carlisle trial. The evidence was powerful, and she probably knew there was nothing she could say to challenge it.

As Judge James Adkin jailed the psychiatrist for five years, he told Alemi: “This was despicable criminality, motivated by pure greed…You used your professional relationship as a foundation for fraud.”

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With the trial over, it struck me that the ability to deceive was at the core of Zholia Alemi’s character; and that it was unlikely that her career in deception could have started with a fraud that would have netted her £1.3m.

I resolved to dig deeper into Alemi’s past; to look for evidence that she had lied and cheated before. The logical place to start, I decided, was the beginning of her medical career. Astonishingly, it took less than a week to prove my hunch right.

According to the General Medical Council, the official regulator for UK based doctors, Alemi had qualified as a doctor in New Zealand. As with all doctors, the registration page listed her credentials, stating clearly where and when she qualified.

The records showed she had the requisite medical degree, a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (referred to as MBChB), awarded in 1992 by the University of Auckland. It took only three of four phone calls to confirm that Alemi’s medical degree was a fiction.

As with other doctors who came to the UK when Alemi did, she took advantage of a simplified registration procedure. Incredibly, her forged qualification documents were accepted by the GMC and in 1995 her name was added to the register of qualified doctors.

That fraud opened the door to a lucrative 22-year medical career.

In a statement issued shortly after the News & Star published our exclusive expose of Alemi, GMC Chief Executive Charlie Massey said: “It is extremely concerning that a person used a fraudulent qualification to join the [UK’s medical] register and we are working to understand how this happened.”

As a consequence of the revelation, the GMC instigated checks on the qualification of another 3,000 doctors who came to the UK from outside the UK. No other fake doctors were identified. Officials say that the registration route abused by Alemi was discontinued in 2003.

When she was first convicted of the will fraud in 2018, the judge who sentenced her told Alemi: “This was despicable criminality, motivated by pure greed… Your status as a doctor was integral to your confidence trick.”

Only now has the extent of Alemi’s deception – and the extent to which she exploited it for financial gain – been fully exposed. She will be sentenced on February 28.