The prosecution argued that he used sick notes to cope with his impossible schedule. In March 2023, he was on sick leave from four of the organisations he worked for. But he kept working at the Home Office and did not tell them he was ill.
His line manager at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Aleesha Adams, organised a video call with him in May 2023. By this point he’d been off sick for three months and she wanted to make a plan to get him back to work.
She told the jury that at the start of the call he was coughing a lot and waving tissues up to the camera. She also told the jury that he had been wearing white make-up to try to look ill.
Adams told the court that as the meeting went on the make-up started coming off his forehead. ”He was sweating, it was like rubbing off so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck.”
Chowdhury told the jury this was a smear and that he had not been wearing make-up.
After the call, Adams discovered that he had logged into the call using a Defra email address. When she challenged him about it he blamed a technical error.
Adams grew suspicious. ”I believed he was lying,” she told the jury. She escalated her concerns up the chain at the UKHSA.
But his fraudulent behaviour went on for several more months until he left the civil service in September 2023.
He was finally caught in 2024 by the government’s National Fraud Initiative, which conducts searches of civil service databases such as payroll every two years to look for anomalies.