Doctor who stole bag so he could return it ... and seduce its owner
Struck off medic also hired prostitute
A hOSPITAL doctor’s career is in tatters after he stole a tourist’s belongings and spent the night with a prostitute.
robert Barnett, 45, was struck off the medical register for stealing items including a £1,000 camera while visiting his daughter in Poland.
Dr Barnett claimed he wandered through the unlocked door of a hotel room where he believed a ‘pretty lady’ was staying, and after a few drinks took the valuables to stop anyone else from stealing them.
he said he hoped to seem like a ‘knight in shining armour’ by returning them to the woman.
however, instead of handing the items straight back to their owner – who it emerged was a actually a male French tourist and not the object of his affections – the doctor took them to his room where he spent the night with a prostitute.
he was arrested in the early hours of the morning at his hotel in Poznan in July 2012 – and convicted in his absence by a Polish court in February 2013.
Dr Barnett was given a sixmonth suspended sentence and told to pay £170 – but later claimed he had no idea that he even had a conviction.
The General Medical Council (GMC) found last December that the conviction meant he was unfit to continue working at Milton Keynes hospital and should be struck off. he was suspended until a last-ditch appeal which has now been rejected by the high Court in London.
The judge, Mr Justice Kerry, ordered him to pay more than £7,000 in GMC legal costs.
The figure was reduced from the £10,000 the council had been seeking, after the judge ruled that figure was too high.
The GMC’s panel chairman Professor Jack Crane told Dr Barnett: ‘Dishonest conduct by a doctor has the potential to damage the public’s perception of the profession as a whole.
‘Patients must trust doctors with their lives and wellbeing and your dishonest conduct places this trust at risk.’
Dr Barnett told the hearing in Manchester he had drunk three or four beers and was not thinking clearly on the night in question. he ‘ vehemently denied’ stealing the items for himself.
Professor Crane continued: ‘The panel did not find your explanation that you were taking the items from an unknown guest’s hotel room for “safekeeping” credible.
‘It considered that, had you wished to protect the items from theft by another person, it would have been far simpler for you to have shut the hotel room door securely. It rejected your account of events.’
Dr Barnett said he had met up with a friend in Poland, and after returning to the hotel at around 11pm he decided to ask a woman he had seen in the corridor earlier out for a drink.
When he knocked on the door to what he believed was her room, he noticed it was open and there were belongings on the bed and on a bedside table.
These included a designer wallet and bag, a Canon camera with tripod and lens, as well as some glasses and medicine. It later turned out that the items belonged to a Frenchman visiting Poland for a wedding.
Mr Justice Kerry said Dr Barnett had previously been suspended for eight months after attacking his ex-partner at royal Derby hospital, his former place of work. Derby Crown Court heard the off- duty doctor punched Agnieska Kucinska and threw her across the room as they argued near the bedside of their baby daughter.