Fake CV builder who landed top NHS jobs including roles as trust chairman ordered to repay £100,000
A former builder who faked his CV to land a series of top NHS jobs has finally been forced to pay the full price for his ‘staggering lies’.
Jon Andrewes, 69, was ordered to pay nearly nearly £100,000 after he lied to get a top NHS job
Jon Andrewes, 69, spent a decade working as chairman of two NHS trusts and chief executive of a hospice after pretending to have a PhD, an MBA and a history of senior management roles.
When Andrewes was exposed he was convicted of fraud, jailed for two years and ordered to hand over all his remaining assets of £96,737. But the confiscation order was overturned by the Court of Appeal two years ago when judges ruled he had given ‘full value’ for his salary in the jobs he did.
Now, more than five years after pleading guilty to fraud charges, Andrewes has had the financial penalty reinstated by the Supreme Court and must pay back nearly £100,000. Under his fake persona, Andrewes insisted on staff calling him ‘Dr’ and claimed to have degrees from three universities. But his only genuine higher education qualification was a certificate in social work.
After starting as a builder he spent much of his career as a probation officer, customs officer or youth worker before inventing a new life for himself as an NHS manager.
The average wait for Category 2 calls in Cornwall was ‘hovering around the 200-minute mark’, the chief executive of the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said
His senior health jobs, which included a £75,000-a-year role as chief executive of a hospice in Taunton, earned him £643,602. He led the Torbay NHS Trust in Devon before becoming chairman of the Royal Cornwall NHS Hospital Trust in 2015. An investigation at the hospice uncovered discrepancies in his CV and led to police being called in. He was sentenced at Exeter Crown Court in 2017.
In their Supreme Court judgment, Lord Hodge and Lord Burrows noted that Andrewes had ‘performed valuable services for the hospice and the two trusts in return for the net earnings’ but also that ‘a person of honesty and integrity’ had been sought for his roles.
They said that Andrewes would not have landed the roles if the truth was known.
They agreed that in CV fraud cases where someone has ‘given full value for the earnings received’ it would normally be disproportionate to confiscate all net earnings, but ‘it will be proportionate to confiscate the difference between the higher earnings made as a result of the fraud and the lower earnings that the defendant would have made had they not committed the fraud’.
