Pharmacist struck off register for cheating RM out of £500k

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Pharmacist Priyesh Rawal, of Impington, struck off register for cheating Royal Mail out of £500k in 'fraud and systematic dishonesty on a grand scale'

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A deceitful online pharmacy boss who was convicted of cheating Royal Mail out of £500,000 has been struck off the register of pharmacists.

Priyesh Rawal, 28, of Impington, carried out “fraud and systematic dishonesty on a grand scale” by lying to the postal service about how many parcels it was dispatching for his OneClick website.

Mr Rawal was handed an 18-month sentence suspended for two years, and ordered to complete 250 hours of unpaid work, atCambridge Crown Court in October last yearafter he admitted obtaining services dishonestly.

The “highly-intelligent” fraudster, of Lone Tree Avenue, was also ordered to hand over £164,808 of his ill-gotten gains.

Mr Rawal has now been struck off by the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), after it found that his “premeditated” deception was “fundamentally incompatible” with his professional status.

Patrick Milmo QC, chairing the GPhC’s Fitness to Practise Committee in London, said the “overwhelming majority” of the website’s 50,000 monthly orders were dispatched by post and the company had a pre-paid deal with Royal Mail, whereby it would voluntarily declare the volume of packages sent.

But by April 2012 Royal Mail suspected the company was under-declaring the number of parcels dispatched and carried out a series of checks.

The investigation found that 470,000 items were dispatched between January and September, 2012, with only about 185,000 declared - a fraud worth £523,769.

Mr Milmo said his staff had been told how to fiddle the figures and added: “This was fraud and systematic dishonesty on a grand scale. It was instigated and operated on the express instructions of Mr Rawal.”

During sentencing, Judge Gareth Hawkesworth told Mr Rawal, who founded One Click Ventures Ltd, which was turning over £18 million a year, was not a fraudster by nature, but had been “driven to it by a combination of inexperience, naivety, stress, and an altruistic drive to benefit others”.

However, Mr Milmo said: “The salient feature of Mr Rawal’s conduct in this case is dishonesty, and because of its effect on the reputation of the profession, that sort of conduct is rarely capable of remedy.”