A FRAUDSTER whose 22-year NHS career as a fake psychiatrist was exposed by a News & Star investigation has been jailed for seven years.

A judge has today today highlighted what she described as an "abject failure" by the UK's medical regulator the General Medical Council (GMC) to properly check the forged qualifications that allowed Zholia Alemi to work as a doctor - despite her never obtaining a medical degree.

Judge Hilary Manley said that even a cursory glance of the primary medical qualifications which Alemi provided to the GMC would have raised suspicions.

Alemi’s career ended in disgrace when she was prosecuted in 2018 for forging the will of an 84-year-old west Cumbrian widow. While working as a locum at Workington Community Hospital, Alemi made an audacious attempt to inherit the £1.3m fortune of Bridekirk woman Gillian Belham.

That audacious forgery was exposed thanks to an alert carer, who contacted police after watches belonging to the widow mysteriously vanished. Alemi denied the fraud, but was convicted after a Carlisle Crown Court trial.

But it was only after the News & Star investigated Alemi’s lucrative NHS career as psychiatrist that the true scale of her deception was uncovered. We confirmed the shocking truth: that Alemi never qualified as a doctor.

She fooled the authorities that she was a qualified doctor by supplying a forged medical degree and verification letter, claiming they came from The University of Auckland’s Medical School.

The fraudster did achieve a degree there in human biology.

But her attempt to gain a medical degree ended in failure when course leaders at the university refused to let her continue with her medical studies after Alemi repeatedly failed to make the grade.

Yet Alemi – using a more relaxed registration scheme that was open to medical graduates from Commonwealth countries – began working as a doctor in the UK purely on the strength of the fake documents she created. 

The revelation sent shockwaves through the medical establishment, prompting the GMC – the body responsible for regulating doctors in the UK – to launch checks on more than 3,000 other doctors who qualified in Commonwealth countries.

READ MORE: Fake doctor exposed by News & Star: She lived a lie for so long that she believed it