Dentist jailed for defrauding NHS
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- Published: Wednesday, 30 December 2015 08:54
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A dentist from north-west London has been jailed for claiming payments totalling £780,000 for work which was never carried out. Jayantilal Bhikhabhai Mistry, 67, from Willesden, was sentenced to three years and ordered to pay £50,000 in costs for fraud and false accounting. Mistry admitted the fraud and paid back the money in full.
Between 1997 and 2013 he routinely invented fictitious patients and forged their signatures. The fraud was discovered by NHS Protect which found that in one case the address he had given as that of a patient in fact belonged to a branch of a bank. Further enquiries found almost 300 patients' addresses that Mistry used did not exist. He kept fake patient records in shopping bags at his practice in Kentish Town, and a master sheet of forged signatures.
Sentencing him, the judge said it had been fraud "on a grand scale". He could have faced a sentence of up to six years, but the judge took into account his poor health. Since his crime was uncovered, he suffered a stroke and is unable to walk or talk properly.
Liz Wood, a counter-fraud specialist at NHS Protect, said it was "one of the largest crimes we've looked at carried out by an individual" and "he did virtually nothing for the NHS". She said they estimated that the amount he claimed in payments could have paid for dental treatments for 4,000 people over the period in which he carried out the fraud.
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