babu M
JF-Expert Member
- Mar 4, 2010
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A married man who pretended to be a doctor faked a paternity test after his lover became pregnant so that he could deny he was the father.
Conrad De Souza seduced scientist and committed Christian Silke Luetzelschwab in December 2007.
He began an affair with her after claiming he was a single doctor when he met her at a conference.
De Souza told her that he had been educated at £9,000-a-term Dulwich College, followed by Cambridge, before working as a GP and then as a heart specialist.
But after Miss Luetzelschwab became pregnant with their daughter, his account soon began to unravel.
De Souza refused to acknowledge fathering the child and Miss Luetzelschwab, 34, was forced to contact the Child Support Agency.
Although a DNA test apparently proved his claim that he was not the father, Miss Luetzelschwab was suspicious and at her insistence enquiries by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission continued.
The investigation found he had used his medical connections to send a DNA sample from his unwitting father Faustino, rather than himself.
Deceitful De Souza was later proved to be the father of Miss Luetzelschwab's daughter, who was born in December 2009, after which the investigation began. It was also revealed that he was in fact married.
And, even more astonishingly, it was discovered that he was not a qualified doctor – despite being paid by the NHS to work in a clinical role for a decade, receiving a sum believed to exceed £500,000.
He had been to neither Dulwich College nor Cambridge, they discovered.
In fact, the British citizen of Asian descent had dropped out of a medical course after little more than a year and is believed to have been schooled in Tanzania, where he was born.
Last night De Souza, 53, of Beckenham, south east London, began a 27-month jail term after admitting three counts of fraud. He also said his wife Roopina Coutinho, 41, left him because of the affair.
Miss Luetzelschwab would have been due to receive £800 a month from De Souza towards their child's upkeep.
But her former lover now has no income at all, and faces having hundreds of thousands seized to repay the money he defrauded from the NHS.
Meanwhile, his former employers face awkward questions about how he was given the jobs in the first place.
Officials insisted there was no evidence he had ever touched a patient – any instance of which would amount to assault – but De Souza himself claimed to have worked as a GP for years. Judge Simon Pratt yesterday told De Souza, as he jailed him at Croydon Crown Court: ‘You are an articulate, driven, and deeply dishonest man, without any apparent conscience about what you were doing.
‘Your behaviour in respect of the paternity of your child was deeply dishonest and wilfully manipulative.'
Prosecutor Robert O'Sullivan told the court: ‘For almost a decade, Mr De Souza held himself out as a fully qualified and appropriately registered GP with a busy London practice.
‘In truth Mr De Souza was not medically qualified – so obtained and kept his job as a result of fraud. He enrolled in 1980 as a medical student at the University of London – but did not graduate.'
Instead of gaining the status of a doctor he and his family craved, the court heard that De Souza worked in an administrative role for a company dealing with doctors.
He then switched to an office role with the NHS Lewisham Primary Care Group, which required no medical qualifications.
But when a job came up in 2001 as a clinical adviser to the Lewisham NHS trust, De Souza falsely claimed to have the ‘clinical expertise and qualifications' required to get it.
In a CV now revealed to be a ‘work of fiction' he boasted of ‘three years' of experience in a busy GP practice. It helped secure him an important role on a ‘coronary heart disease and stroke clinical support panel'. And in 2005 he was promoted to become assistant clinical director of the South East London Managed Clinical Cardiac network.
De Souza's barrister Sangita Modgil said: ‘He simply couldn't cope with the concept that he had not managed to become a doctor.
‘On the paternity issue, he could not cope with the concept of his wife discovering he's had an affair.'
An NHS Lewisham spokesman said it had ‘learnt lessons' from the case.
