A bogus dentist who used a forged degree certificate to gain top jobs around the country has been given a three-year jail sentence.
Vanisha Sharma, from Willenhall, West Midlands, earned nearly £230,000 while working at six hospitals over a nine-year period after using a fake Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) degree from a university in India to register with the General Dental Council.
The 37-year-old wrongly claimed to have studied for the qualification at the Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar.
The certificate was taken as proof of qualification and no checks into the authenticity of her degree were made, said Anthony Evans, prosecuting.
He said there was no record of Sharma ever attending the university in India and revealed that although she studied dentistry for three years in London during the early 90s, she continually failed her exams.
Her deception was uncovered following after an investigation by the NHS Counter Fraud Service in 2008, and she pleaded guilty to seven counts of fraud and forgery at Wolverhampton Crown Court in September last year.
Judge Amjad Nawaz said her persistent course of offences were "pre-determined and deliberate" breaches of the public's trust.
"It does seem to me that the level at which this offending took place, and the organisation which must have gone behind it in order to obtain the documents, was very pre-determined and, in those circumstances, highly criminal," he said.
