Ferrari-obsessed dentist jailed for swindling £220k from NHS to fund his fleet of sports cars is struck off
One patient he claimed to have treated was a baby who didn't have any teeth
A FERRARI driving dentist who swindled nearly £223,000 from the NHS by claiming for bogus appointments has been banned from dentistry for good.
Mark Walewski, 68, was locked up for three years earlier this year for the systematic fraud at the New Dental Surgery in Hindhead, Surrey.
Walewski scammed the NHS by charging both the patient and the NHS for treatments and claiming for work he didn't even carry out between 2006 and 2012, the General Dental Council was told.
Most of the 6,608 fraudulent claims were for babies and small children.
One of the tots was reported to be only 17 days old and had no teeth.
Walewski used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle and buy a fleet of sports cars even though he earned on average £150,000 a year.
When the fraud was discovered Walewski was living in a £2million six-bedroom country home with its own lake in Churt, near Farnham, Surrey.
He owned a collection of cars including a Ferrari 430 and Lotus 2-Eleven.
The six-year fraud was only discovered after an anonymous tip off, the hearing was told.
Walewski manipulated the Units of Dental Activity process and the total loss to the NHS was £222,703.34.
He was sentenced to three years in prison for one count of fraud and 20 months for another, both between April 4, 2007 and August 10, 2012 at Guildford Crown Court.
He also got two years for one count of evasion of a liability and 16 months for another of the same count both covering the period April 1, 2006 and March 31, 2007, all to be served at the same time.
Jailing the crooked dentist Judge Stephen Climie said: "You provided the NHS with over 6,500 false claims.
"The payments that you were to receive from the NHS (approximately one third of the income) came from the fraud.
"For a significant period of time, some six years or thereabouts in total, you abused the system that was available to you, and, as a result, the NHS suffered those significant losses.
"I am told that now it is accepted that the direct loss, in terms of a figure, to the NHS as a whole comes to some £222,000 or thereabouts.
"This is a case which, in my judgment, involved a gross abuse of the position of trust which you held."
The judge said the fraudster dentist had damaged his reputation and "cast a shadow" over the profession as a whole.
He added: "When others read of frauds such as this, it is an understandable human reaction to reflect upon their own practitioner - their own dentist, their own doctor, depending on the profession within which the defendant operates - and that has a significant impact on the profession as a whole."
The General Dental Council found that Walewski's fitness to practice was impaired due to his criminal conviction and his name has been erased from the dental register.
The GDC committee chairwoman Ilana Tessler said: "The Committee considered that the convictions in this case were so serious that they attracted a sentence of imprisonment and that it would be wholly inappropriate not to make a finding of current impairment.
"Mr Walewski's behaviour is fundamentally incompatible with him being a dental professional.
"The Committee concluded that the only proportionate sanction is that of erasure."