A civil servant allegedly held five full-time jobs simultaneously and was at one point contracted to work 183 hours a week, more hours than exist in seven days, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Kashim Chowdhury’s case comes as the Cabinet Office’s National Fraud Initiative says it has identified at least 301 public sector employees holding overlapping jobs, described as “polygamous working”, since 2016. Around £1.35 million in fraudulent salary payments was recovered over the ten-year period from staff across government departments.

Jurors were told that Chowdhury, now 56, earned almost £350,000 from eight employers between February 2020 and September 2023. That included more than £280,000 in gross pay for months in which he held more than one full-time position.

Prosecutors said he exploited the shift to remote working during the Covid-19 pandemic and used fake sick notes to conceal his commitments. In an incident prosecutor Lucy Organ described as “laughable”, he allegedly wore white make-up during a video call with his boss, apparently to look ill.

Chowdhury began working for Tower Hamlets Council in February 2020 and took a second job with Defra in April 2021. Those roles overlapped for more than a year, the court heard. For four months in 2022, he also worked for East London NHS Trust.

After leaving the council, prosecutors said, he retained his Defra job while taking further positions with the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Health Security Agency, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. By May 2023, he was being paid for five full-time roles.

During his trial, Chowdhury told the court that work was his “lifeline”. The Crown Prosecution Service said it would seek to recover his fraudulent earnings through a proceeds of crime hearing.

The National Fraud Initiative identified 13 cases of overlapping employment in the 2024–25 financial year and says it is seeking further abuses. A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said a recent pilot across local boroughs had made almost £490,000 in savings, describing the initiative as a tool for protecting taxpayers’ money.

The civil service workforce grew from 382,945 full-time employees in 2021 to more than 442,000 last year. Those workforce figures and the fraud totals cover different periods: they do not establish how widespread overlapping employment is, or whether workforce growth has contributed to it. The £1.35 million recovered measures money reclaimed, not the full extent of any losses.