Fake dentist loses bid to change pleas

A woman who worked at a Midland hospital using a bogus qualification and got jobs and earned nearly £230,000 over nine years, saw an application to change her guilty pleas refused.

Vinisha Sharma, of Willenhall, admitted using a fake Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree from India to get work at a hearing in September.

She tried to vacate her pleas to seven charges of fraud and forgery after sacking her lawyers. Her application was refused at Birmingham Crown Court by Judge Amjad Nawaz.

The bogus qualification secured Sharma, a former Wolverhampton Girls High School pupil, a job for eight months at The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust, working at Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital, in 2000.

She then worked as a senior house officer in the oral and maxillo-facial departments of six hospital trusts. Sharma, aged 37, applied to vacate pleas on grounds that while she accepted the documents were fake, she did not know or believe them to have been so at the time she used them.

Sharma said she initially pleaded guilty at Wolverhampton Crown Court in September as a result of advice from her then legal council.

She claimed she feared the weight of prosecution evidence would lead to her being found guilty after trial, leading to a tougher sentence.

Sharma also said she tried to change her plea from 'guilty' to 'not guilty' at the last minute, but was told by her counsel it was too late to ask to request a trial because the jury was sworn in.

Judge Nawaz said Sharma had "more than sufficient'' time to consider the consequences of her plea before it was made. He said: "The basis of this application is that she believed her certificates were genuine. But It was clear that the case against her was not just that the documents were false but that they were used with her having known or believing them to be false."

The case was adjourned for sentence until March 28 for a pre-sentence report . Sharma was given conditional bail and made subject of a curfew order from 9pm-6am every night.

She has also been told she must live and sleep at her parents' house in Honeybourne Way, Willenhall, until sentencing and she must also refrain from applying for any travel documents.

Sharma is banned from going within a five-mile radius of Birmingham International Airport. Sharma claimed she had a degree from an institute in India, but she actually had no qualifications after dropping out of a five-year dentistry course in London after four years.