Chemist is jailed for forging doctors’ scripts

A PHARMACIST was yesterday jailed for 20 months after forging prescriptions and committing VAT fraud of more than £200,000.

Conrad Chau got pharmaceutical firms to send him more drugs at a discounted price so he could sell them on to other companies at a profit.

The 51-year-old faxed copies of prescriptions for quotacontrolled drugs pretending that they had been written out by doctors while he owned the Holburn Pharmacy, in Aberdeen.

Chau, who is no longer involved with the business, also changed addresses on invoices to a location in Saudi Arabia so that the VAT was zero-rated and failed to pass on documents to his accountant.

The married father, pictured, was caught after it emerged that he had been submitting fake prescriptions to two drug companies between February and June 2013.

He admitted a string of fraud charges when he appeared in court last month.

Fiscal depute Kelly Mitchell previously told the court the pharmacist had ‘fraudulently altered prescriptions for products that had never been prescribed by relevant doctors’.

The fraud was discovered when a comparison was made between the genuine prescriptions issued by local GPs and received by the NHS and the forged versions of the same documents, which had been sent to the pharmaceutical companies.

Miss Mitchell told the court that boxes had been delivered which contained invoices from the pharmacy to a healthcare practice in Saudi Arabia.

She said: ‘The invoices suggested that drugs were being exported to Saudi Arabia. As such, the sale was deemed to be zero-rated for VAT.’

Inquiries carried out by the NHS fraud service established that the health care practice that the invoices were sent from was actually operating in Glasgow.

The pharmacist had received £214,790.77 for the VAT payment.

Chau’s solicitor, George Mathers, said his client had not initially realised the seriousness of the offence and that someone had given him bad advice.

He said Chau had now sold the pharmacy and was working as a locum elsewhere.

He said he intended to pay back the cash he had fraudulently taken.

Jailing the pharmacist, Sheriff William Summers described it as a ‘loss to the public purse’.