A woman who posed as a qualified psychiatrist and worked in the NHS for more than two decades has been ordered to repay over £400,000 or serve additional time behind bars.
Zholia Alemi, 62, of Burnley, secured jobs across the UK by submitting forged medical credentials to the General Medical Council (GMC), despite never completing her medical degree. She was convicted of 20 offences, including forgery, and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2023 following a trial at Manchester Crown Court.
On Wednesday, a judge ruled that Alemi must return £406,624 to the NHS in compensation or face a further two-and-a-half years in prison. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said she “cheated the public purse” while putting patients at potential risk.
Alemi, who was originally from Iran, moved to New Zealand in the early 1990s, where she failed to complete the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree at the University of Auckland. After being refused permission to resit, she forged a degree certificate and a letter of verification in 1995, documents riddled with errors, including a misspelling of the word verify.
Despite the clear irregularities, both documents were accepted by the GMC, allowing Alemi to register as a doctor and work as a psychiatrist for over 20 years. The court heard she earned more than £1.3 million in NHS wages during that time, despite lacking any formal medical qualifications.
Obtained employment as NHS psychiatrist for 20 years
Adrian Foster of the CPS said, “Alemi had little regard for patient welfare. She used forged New Zealand medical qualifications to obtain employment as an NHS psychiatrist for 20 years. In doing so, she must have treated hundreds of patients while unqualified, potentially putting those patients at risk.”
The sentencing judge, Hilary Manley, called for an inquiry into the GMC’s failure to detect the forged documents, describing them as “clearly false”.
Alemi’s fraud history dates back further. In 2018, she was sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to fraudulently inherit the home and £300,000 estate of an elderly woman by forging her will.
Following that conviction, the GMC apologised for its inadequate verification processes in the 1990s and launched an urgent review of the credentials of around 3,000 foreign-trained doctors practising in the UK.
