Civil Servant Accused of Working Five Government Jobs at Once Was Contracted for 183 Hours a Week, Which Is 15 More Hours Than God Put in It

Britain has spent years asking whether working from home makes people lazy. A courtroom in London is now hearing the case for the opposite problem: a man accused of working from home so hard that he ran out of week.

Kashim Chowdhury, 55, of east London, is on trial at Southwark Crown Court accused of fraudulently earning more than £284,000 by juggling multiple full-time public-sector jobs. He denies nine counts of fraud. He also, on Wednesday, denied the one thing every employee secretly fears: that he meant it.

"I accept I made mistakes but I do not believe there was criminal intent," he told the jury. Most people say that about a reply-all. He is saying it about the civil service.

According to the prosecution, in the spring of 2023 he was employed at once by Defra, the UK Health Security Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Department for Business and Trade and the Home Office. That is not a career. That is a cabinet reshuffle with one guy in it.

The jury heard he was contracted to work 183 hours a week. A week has 168. The other 15 hours were presumably sourced from a supplier, invoiced to a sixth department and lost in procurement.

One month in 2023, the court heard, the five employers paid him £11,015.62 in take-home wages. Between February 2020 and September 2023 he allegedly held eight positions and earned £349,378. Economists have long wondered why British productivity stalled. It turns out it was all in one laptop, and the laptop was in a meeting.

The prosecution says he kept the jobs apart by working entirely remotely, telling employers he was the sole carer for his elderly mother. Cameras off is a privilege. Five sets of cameras off is a business model.

Not everyone was dazzled. Abigail Mounde, his line manager at the Department for Business and Trade, told the court: "Any basic tasks I asked him to do he either did late or not to the standard I would have expected." Which is the cruelest twist: he allegedly did the work of five civil servants and got the reviews of none.

He rejected the performance criticism entirely. "I absolutely reject them all," he said. Then, asked by the judge whether the criticisms had at least been made, he answered, "Yes, your honour." A man can deny the review. He cannot deny the meeting where it happened. He may have been in it five times.

The prosecution says he used sick notes for "mixed anxiety and depressive disorder" with some employers while carrying on at others. So he was allegedly too unwell to work at one ministry and fit enough to be late at four more. That is not sick leave. That is load balancing.

Then came the make-up. A manager at the Health Security Agency said he logged on to a return-to-work video call wearing white make-up, which prosecutors say was meant to make him look ill, and that as he sweated it began to rub off his forehead. Prosecutor Lucy Organ called it an "almost laughable incident." The jury, being British, was not allowed to laugh, which may be the hardest job anyone in that room has had.

Chowdhury said he had been "overwhelmed and stressed" and felt "terror and panic" at the thought of losing his livelihood. On that, the whole country agrees with him. Most of us feel it about one job.

Also mislaid during the investigation, the court heard: three mobile phones and some memory sticks. The trial continues. So, on paper, does his 183-hour week.