The undisputed facts at the centre of this case are astonishing.
For more than three and a half years, Kashim Chowdhury held jobs in several government departments simultaneously while collecting multiple salaries.
In total, he occupied eight overlapping civil service roles. He held at least two full-time positions at any one time, sometimes three, and at the height of the alleged fraud reported to five separate employers: the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the UK Health Security Agency, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office.
It is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary employment arrangement.
The 56-year-old was paid £349,378.81 despite, in effect, doing little or no work.
Chowdhury nevertheless asked the court to accept that he had no criminal intention and that he ‘wasn’t thinking straight’—a claim he made at least eight times, according to the evidence—when misleading managers about his employment status.
The jury rejected that explanation. Yesterday, he was convicted of nine fraud offences, including making false representations and obtaining a dishonest gain.
One detail, among many, appears to have left jurors in no doubt. It also captured the extraordinary failures within parts of the civil service.
For more than three and a half years, Kashim Chowdhury held jobs across several government departments while receiving multiple salaries
When five departments employed him at the same time, Chowdhury was theoretically contracted to work 183 hours a week. That is more hours than there are in seven days—even if, as the prosecutor observed, he had ‘not slept at all and worked night and day every day of the week including the weekend’.
The arrangement also meant genuine applicants were denied the opportunity to fill those roles.
The broader scandal is that Chowdhury may be the most extreme example of a practice becoming increasingly common in both the public and private sectors.
The phenomenon has become so widespread since remote working expanded that it has acquired its own name: ‘polygamous working’. The cost to taxpayers and businesses is potentially enormous.
The Chowdhury case, however, raises several particularly troubling questions.
First, he operated in full view. He used his own National Insurance number throughout the alleged deception, and all the personal details attached to his applications were genuine. Nothing appears to have been fabricated, making the length of time he went undetected even more remarkable.
How was he able to continue for so long?
Official government channels did not provide an answer. But payroll and human resources functions within government departments are outsourced to private companies, suggesting that in this case one part of the state—perhaps Defra—did not know what another, such as the Home Office or the Department for Business and Trade, was doing.
It is difficult to find another explanation for one civil servant receiving numerous salaries from departments that ultimately answer to the same employer.
Second, although the managers overseeing Chowdhury consistently found his performance unacceptable—how could it have been otherwise?—there was little sign of effective disciplinary action. His manager at the UK Health Security Agency described him as ‘exceptionally poor’. At Defra, he was labelled ‘passive and slow to deliver tasks’. A Home Office manager said, ‘He wasn’t interested in the job’, while a Department for Business and Trade manager called his performance ‘very poor’.
On one occasion, Chowdhury even applied white make-up to his face during a video call to make himself appear ill. He added coughing and spluttering for effect, but his supervisor noticed the make-up separating on his forehead as he spoke, revealing his natural skin colour.
It sounds almost farcical.
What is less amusing is that he remained employed as a senior project manager at the Health Security Agency, on a salary of £52,606, for 18 months. During that period, he was also working for four other departments and receiving similarly poor assessments.
The individual managers should not necessarily be blamed.
Dismissal in the public sector can be a lengthy and difficult process, made more complicated by the employment rights being introduced by the Government. Chowdhury claimed he was suffering from stress, including ‘mixed anxiety and depressive disorder’, according to one medical certificate. He also cited the declining health of his mother, who had cancer, and a recurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder.
He told Southwark Crown Court that the condition, diagnosed a decade earlier, was linked to a personal injury payment after he was forced out of the Department for Education.
There is no dispute that he received £10,000 in compensation from the department. But PTSD is more commonly associated with returning soldiers or people who have experienced life-changing trauma, such as a serious road collision or an assault.
Working for the Department for Education hardly fits that description.
Controversy of one kind or another has followed Chowdhury throughout much of his civil service career.
Chowdhury’s alleged fraud began after the Covid pandemic, when he exploited remote working and the culture surrounding sick notes
But one important revelation has not previously been reported.
For more than two years, until June 2022, Kashim Chowdhury worked as a programme manager in public health for Tower Hamlets Council on an annual salary of £49,203.
A whistleblower who spoke to Our News Outlet said he was dismissed after the council discovered that, despite declaring on an official form that he had no other employment, he had also been working for Defra for a considerable period.
If that information had been shared more widely, Chowdhury’s alleged fraud might have been brought to an end much sooner.
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Instead, he continued working for Defra and other government departments for another year. That ended in July 2023, when police forced entry to his home and interviewed him under caution.
He was finally charged with nine counts of fraud in April 2025.
Yet by then, according to the source, Tower Hamlets had rehired him on a fixed-term contract in its homelessness service. That position was later made permanent.
‘I kid you not,’ the source said. ‘Nobody knows how or why. They were not only going to give him another permanent contract, he was also being considered for promotion and a new salary of more than £60,000 a year.’
Chowdhury is believed to have been dismissed by Tower Hamlets only last year. The council was approached for comment but, at the time of writing, had neither confirmed nor denied the allegations.
By all accounts, Kashim Chowdhury did not appear to be an obvious candidate for such an extraordinary fraud.
‘He was a bit odd,’ said a former council colleague. ‘I only saw him in the office once. It was the middle of summer and he was wearing a bobble hat. People felt a bit sorry for him.
‘When the news broke about all the jobs he had, we were completely shocked. You would never have expected it of him.’
He arrived at court wearing dark sunglasses, a black mask over his mouth and an oversized duffle-style coat with a hood, apparently trying to avoid recognition.
Chowdhury still lives in the same Georgian terrace near Brick Lane in London’s East End where his late parents lived for many years. His father was a tailor’s machinist. The family originally came from Pakistan before settling in Britain from Bangladesh, where Chowdhury met and married his wife through a relative in 2017.
The couple are no longer believed to live together.
The property, valued at £2.1 million, stands in one of the capital’s fashionable areas. Actress Keira Knightley and artists Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George live nearby. Following his conviction, money allegedly taken from the taxpayer could be recovered from the property’s equity under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
The Crown Prosecution Service has already applied to register a charge against the house, which is also at the centre of a bitter family dispute in the High Court.
Chowdhury allegedly operated in plain sight, using his own National Insurance number and genuine personal details throughout the scheme
Chowdhury has been accused by his three siblings of exerting ‘undue influence’ over their 76-year-old mother, who spoke very little English, to transfer the family home into his name a week before she died of cancer in 2023.
He studied politics and history at university before completing a master’s degree in public policy and management. Whatever his academic qualifications, his finances appeared healthy—presumably as a result of his multiple jobs.
In one month in 2023, his take-home pay exceeded £11,000. That, prosecutor Lucy Organ told the jury, ‘might be thought’ to have been the motivating factor.
Between March 2020 and September 2022, he transferred £250,000 to relatives and used money to pay off credit cards. Even after those transactions, he had £30,000 in a Barclays account, more than £80,000 with Virgin Money and £45,000 in premium bonds.
His alleged fraud began after the Covid pandemic, when he took advantage of remote working and the widespread use of sick notes.
It is difficult to hold down five government jobs simultaneously when each requires you to be physically present at a desk.
Several witnesses told the court they had never met Chowdhury in person before appearing as witnesses at his trial. During one period, while he was employed by the Department for Business and Trade, he took ten weeks of sick leave shortly after returning from annual leave.
His line managers said he frequently cited the need to care for his sick mother, avoided video calls and failed to attend meetings that were otherwise compulsory.
They repeatedly made allowances for his personal circumstances, hoping that additional support would improve his dismal performance.
Richard Arkless, of the Home Office, recalled that Chowdhury was permitted to join an in-person team meeting remotely because of his caring responsibilities.
‘He logged on, but there was little to no interaction during the day,’ he said in a statement. ‘The camera was switched off, so I cannot say whether he was present, but he was not engaging.’
Mr Arkless described Chowdhury’s overall performance as ‘poor’. He also said that, during his short period of employment, Chowdhury quickly exceeded the permitted limit for sick days.
Chowdhury rejected the criticism, saying, ‘I reject them all.’ He insisted that he had never intended to defraud anyone, although he acknowledged making mistakes on his job applications.
Concerns about his conduct eventually triggered an investigation by the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), the government body responsible for identifying cases of this kind. A data-matching exercise across 26 London boroughs, designed to detect ‘polygamous working’ and piloted by the NFI over several months last year, led to 22 dismissals or resignations and uncovered £400,000 in salary overpayments.
Since 2016, the NFI has identified 301 employees involved in ‘polygamous working’, including 256 in England. The organisation says it has recovered salary payments worth as much as £1.35 million.
The rise in such cases has also created a small social media industry offering advice on deceiving employers. One widely discussed tactic is ‘mouse jiggling’, which keeps a computer appearing active while its user is away from the desk.
‘I recently found out my boss’s boss is being promoted, and his new salary is 65 per cent of what I make at best,’ one anonymous polygamous worker boasted on Reddit.
Kashim Chowdhury, in other words, may be only the most visible tip of a growing iceberg of employment fraud.
