..IN THE NEWS...IN THE NEWS DOCTOR MADE £350,000 OUT OF


CRASH-FOR-CASH SCAM WITH FAKE INJURY REPORTS


A GP who made £350,000 a year with a ‘report-writ- ing factory’ for fraudulent personal injury claims has been struck off. Metro reports that Dr Asef Zafar, 54, rattled out 5,000 papers per year at around £70 a go to make money on top of his lucrative NHS salary. The Surrey- based doctor was eventually caught out when a person- al injury law firm accidentally sub- mitted two of his reports, one of which was accurate and the other one


spuriously altered to exaggerate the claimant’s


pain.


Zafar was suspend- ed by the Medical Practitioners Tri- bunal in 2019 and after losing an appeal against his punishment he has been struck off from the register for misconduct. At the High Court in London, Lord Jus- tice Davis said: “He, remarkably, seems to have developed a system where he apparently could examine a patient or client and pro- duce a report in the space of approxi-


mately 15 minutes. He was to say that he might produce some 5,000 reports a year, with an annual gross income of around £350,000. Quite how he was able to fit all this around his NHS responsibili- ties is not clear, and at all events it seems that his NHS premises were fre- quently used for his private medico- legal practice.” The judge heard how the dishonest operation went on for 12 years before it all came falling down. Zafar nar-


Asef Zafar


rowly avoided jail in 2018 after a person- al injury law firm accidentally sub- mitted two of his reports. One accu- rately told how a taxi driver injured in a crash had been in pain for one week, while the other


report claimed he had suffered six to eight months of pain. Zafar and solicitor Kamar Khan – whose firm TKW was shut down in 2016 by the Solicitors Regula- tion Authority – were found guilty of contempt of court. Khan was jailed for 15 months and Zafar handed a six- month suspended sentence.


The


dodgy doctor was then suspended from practise by the Medical Practi- tioners Tribunal in 2019. But the case was taken to the


Court of Appeal by the General Medical Council and the Professional Stan- dards Authority for Health and Social Care, who argued the punishment was ‘gravely wrong’. The court quashed the sus- pension and instead struck him off from the medi- cal register for misconduct. Lord Justice Davis ruled: “Erasure is the only proper sanction. Accordingly, I would direct era- sure of Dr Zafar’s name from the Medical Register.”


MAY 2020


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