A “most accomplished fraudster” was paid between £1m and £1.3m by the NHS during the nearly two decades she posed as a qualified doctor after forging a degree certificate, a court has heard. Zholia Alemi, believed to be 60 years old, worked as a psychiatrist in the UK for 19 years after claiming to have qualified at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, a trial at Manchester crown court heard. The defendant is accused of 20 offences, including forgery and fraud, which she denies. Opening the case, Christopher Stables, prosecuting, said: “To put it bluntly, the defendant is a fraud. “While she held herself out as being a doctor, she was utterly unqualified to do so.” Stables said Alemi forged a degree certificate and a letter of verification that is alleged to have come from the University of Auckland, which she then submitted to the General Medical Council (GMC) in 1995, with the aim of becoming a registered doctor in the UK. He said Alemi had deceived the GMC into accepting that she was a fully qualified doctor through “bogus assertions as to what her experience had been”. “Rather than passing her [medical] exams, she in fact failed them and was never qualified at all,” Stables said. “She had in fact secured entry on to the GMC register of medical practitioners but had done so by fraud; by forging her qualifications and other documents, which induced the GMC to accept her as genuine.” She joined the GMC medical register using the legitimate Commonwealth route, the jury was told. The court heard that Alemi had practised as a doctor in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2017, “quite literally the length and breadth of the country”, according to Stables. During this period, she worked at various health bodies and trusts, at times was employed by the NHS and secured positions through recruitment or staffing agencies, where she was paid. Stables said: “A conservative estimate, and I stress a conservative estimate, as to the quantum – so the overall amount of money fraudulently obtained by the defendant from the NHS – is somewhere, the prosecution say, between £1m and £1.3m.” The basic medical qualification and the degree that all doctors in the UK must hold, bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery, is almost always achieved after successfully completing a six-year period of study, Stables told the jury. The court heard that in 1991, the defendant passed the first stage of her degree, achieving a bachelor of human biology, and was not allowed to repeat the year after failing the second year of part two of the bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery, which would not qualify her to be a doctor. Stables said he believed Alemi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1962. Records show that she had married a New Zealand national in 1987 and her occupation was listed as a nurse. By 1995, she was living in the UK at an address in Winchester, Hampshire, the court was told. Stables said: “This defendant was at all times posing as a psychiatrist despite not having a genuine medical degree. “She decided to achieve by forgery what she had failed to achieve by academic study. “She didn’t ever complete the course. She didn’t pass, and cannot therefore have been awarded the degree that she claims to have.” The jury heard Alemi’s case was that she was appropriately qualified and documents demonstrating her qualifications were genuine. She denies 13 counts of fraud, three counts of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception, two counts of forgery and two counts of using a false instrument. The trial is expected to last four to five weeks.