A bogus doctor at the centre of Britain's most flagrant medical con was jailed for 10 years yesterday after a five-year campaign of deception that hoodwinked some of the nation's most eminent institutions.
Barian Baluchi, 43, a former minicab driver, earned at least £1.5m in fees from private patients after acquiring a fake identity as a doctor in 1998.
The walls of his clinic near Harley Street were laden with certificates purporting to show he was an eminent professor of psychiatry with a string of qualifications from both sides of the Atlantic.
But Baluchi, an immigrant from Iran, had no medical competence, and the facade he presented came from stealing a sequence of other people's identities.
In a bizarre lapse, the General Medical Council allowed him to gain full membership of the medical register by changing his name twice in less than a year to assume other doctors' qualifications.
The GMC let this happen in spite of a direct warning from one of the doctors whose identity was being stolen, Middlesex Guildhall crown court in London was told.
The deception allowed him to build up a clientele of more than 2,000 patients at his private clinic and become an expert witness at immigration appeals tribunals, specialising in reports on the psychiatric condition of asylum seekers. These medical reports earned him £375,000.
The Charity Commission registered his clinic as a mental health charity for migrants, allowing him to make a further £440,000 from government grants and charitable donations from bodies, including the King's Fund.
The large income he banked by "bleeding the public purse" allowed him to buy a £670,000 five-bedroomed house and luxury cars - including a £50,000 Mercedes with the plate D8CTR, and to send his daughter to private school.
He was caught after an immigration tribunal officer told the Home Office Baluchi's psychiatric assessments of asylum seekers were suspiciously similar. The Home Office called in the NHS Counter Fraud service and Metropolitan police.
Baluchi, of Hampton, south-west London, admitted 30 sample charges covering a period from December 1998 to August 2003.
They included 12 of obtaining a money transfer by deception, three of doing an act intended to pervert the course of public justice, two of procuring a registration by making false declarations, and one of supplying false and misleading information to the Charity Commission.
Others involved perjury, deception, causing actual bodily harm, administering a medicinal product, possessing a class A drug, and having class B drugs with intent to supply.
Judge Henry Blacksell told him: "You are a practised and out-and-out fraudster and deceiver. You have deceived those around you and those whom you have come into contact with ever since you came into this country from Iran.
"The Charity Commission was deceived, charitable organisations were deceived, the Department of Health was deceived, Barking council was deceived, the courts were deceived and the people who went to your clinic and were supposedly treated by you were deceived."
He continued: "Your criminality almost, even for a practised fraudster, falls into new territory in this case... You deceived good people who were themselves anxious to help others and really used them to your advantage ... You weren't qualified. And the fact people felt they were helped by your quackery is no mitigation at all."
Outside court, case officer Detective Constable Mark Horner said: "Baluchi deceived, exploited and abused the bastions of our society for his personal financial gain. But more importantly, he preyed on and exploited vulnerable people who had sought his help."
One paid £150 for him to carve a wart off his penis. Another became addicted to antidepressants prescribed for neck ache. A third left in agony after "treatment" on his back.
Louise Kamill, prosecuting, told the court that Baluchi arrived in Britain in 1979 as a student, then claimed asylum, married his first wife four years later to avoid deportation, got "indefinite leave to remain", and divorced her in 1990.
In the late nineties he set about reinventing himself as "Professor Barian Samuel Baluchi MB ChB MSc PhD, consultant psychiatrist and neuro psychiatrist".
He bought a PhD from America for £12,000 and established a counselling clinic in September 1998.
He perpetrated the fraud by assuming the identity of Abdul Doshoki, a former trainee doctor, who had let his provisional registration lapse. Baluchi wrote to the GMC, got the registration reinstated, and later told them he had changed his name to Baluchi.
He then hijacked a Spanish psychiatrist's name to get full registration.
The GMC - which was last night bracing itself for the final report of the Shipman inquiry today - did not detect impropriety in spite of a direct warning from Mr Doshoki in April 2001 that he did not want to reregister and was not changing his name.
Sylvia Brady, of the NHS counter fraud service, said: "Baluchi has committed a massive breach of trust... he abused the faith of his patients and exploited the health service."
