A SENIOR GP who stole more than £1million of NHS money to fund his “desperate” addiction to online gambling has been struck off.
Dr Rumi Chhapia tried to hit the jackpot on slot machines and roulette.
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The 45-year-old — who earned nearly £200,000 a year — began his fraud after being put in charge of the accounts of a group of 16 surgeries.
He embezzled £1.13million over 41 days in 2020.
When colleagues in Portsmouth, Hants, grew suspicious he claimed that his accounts had been hacked.
Chhapia, of Southsea — jailed for 40 months at the city’s crown court last year — has now been struck off by a Medical Practitioners Tribunal.
Gambling firms were understood to have agreed to pay back £904,000 after Chhapia wrote grovelling letters to them.
He gambled away a total of £2.5 million, of which he recouped £1.2 million.
The funds were stolen while the NHS was struggling to deal with the Covid 19 pandemic.
Medical Practitioners Tribunal Chair Ian Comfort said: “Dr Chhapia placed patients at risk of harm and breached a fundamental tenet of the profession by taking funds that were necessary for patient care.
“The Tribunal took into account that this was not a single incident of fraud, but 64 separate transactions over 41 days, totalling a significant amount of money.”
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