How doctors and lawyers fell for King Con

The astonishing ease with which a bogus doctor conned the legal and medical professions can be revealed today. Barian Baluchi, 43, faces jail for an extraordinary deception.

He persuaded courts, doctors, lawyers and charities that he was a qualified psychiatrist and professor despite having no qualifications or medical experience. He made hundreds of thousands of pounds in the process.

An Evening Standard investigation has revealed a shocking lack of checks by the medical and legal worlds. Today an expert warned there were others like Baluchi.

Neville Davis, president of court experts group the Medico-Legal Society, said: "This has happened before and it will happen again. The country needs a single body policing this vast area."

The twice-married father of two admitted 30 charges ahead of his trial that began on Monday at London's Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court. Baluchi's deception began in 1998 when he conned the country's foremost medical watchdog - the General Medical Council - into registering him as a doctor.

He met a former trainee doctor who had let his provisional registration lapse. Baluchi wrote to the GMC claiming to be that doctor. With no checks it reinstated the registration.

This led to him conning a host of other agencies and organisations with ease. Iran-born Baluchi next applied to the Charity Commission for charitable status for his Kimia Clinic Trust in Hammersmith, which he said would provide mental health services to refugees.

Although the commission carried out financial checks, he gave false information about his background. It failed to discover any wrongdoing and granted the clinic charitable-status. Next Baluchi managed to work his way into the legal world. He persuaded three unidentified solicitors, who failed to carry out checks, to give him references for his application to the Law Society publication.

After that, he was called up regularly to act as an expert witness in court.

He used the same trick to become a permanent fixture with the Expert Witness Institute, writing hundreds of psychiatric reports and earning £375,000.

His dubious activities even earned him enough to buy a £670,000 house in Hampton and send his daughter to private school. Baluchi also duped several charities into giving him grants worth ?400,000 by convincing them that he would use their money for his clinic.

A spokesman for the Esmee Fairburn Foundation, which handed Baluchi a £50,000 grant in 2000, said: "It has to be said that he had a very convincing manner."