A DENTIST who let her unqualified boyfriend wreak havoc on patients’ teeth while she went on a shopping spree was struck off yesterday.

Mogjan Azari, 39, who was jailed for a year in 2005, has now been banned from practising after she let Omid Amidi-Mazaheri, 42, an asylum-seeker, loose on her patients.

He left them in agony, drilling teeth without anaesthetic and installing fillings that fell out within days. On one occasion he broke a syringe in a patient’s mouth and dropped part of it down his throat.

The Iranian pair split the proceeds of their £120,000 fraud buying designer clothes and a new Mercedes sportscar.

Amidi-Mazaheri even posed as a dead former colleague to carry on treating more than 600 private patients after health officials began an investigation. Azari, who appeared before the General Dental Council in Central London, qualified in Sweden.

Her boyfriend had no dental qualifications and never registered as a dentist in Britain but picked up some skills while working as a dental technician in a laboratory.

He was taken on by Azari at her practice in Norbury, Croydon, in September 2002, but by January the following year health officials had become suspicious and Azari moved him to her other surgery in Tulse Hill, southwest London.

In April 2003 Amidi obtained a lease for a surgery in Dog Kennel Hill, East Dulwich, with an elderly dentist, Johannes Kidane. Mr Kidane was not in good health and his hands visibly trembled. Amidi-Mazaheri practiced by impersonating Mr Kidane or using him as an unwitting front for the practice.

The charade continued even after Mr Kidane died of a stroke in January 2004 and Amidi-Mazaheri introduced himself as the elderly dentist when an inspector visited the surgery a month later.

Detectives launched Operation Immanuel in 2003 after learning that bogus claims for treatment were being filed from Azari’s South London clinics, in London Road, Norbury; Tulse Hill, Brixton; and Bramhill Road, Catford. The couple later split up and turned on each other with Amidi-Mazaheri claiming that Azari convinced him he could legally treat patients at her surgery.

Azari, who earned £100,000 a year, claimed she stopped working with Amidi-Mazaheri when she discovered he was not registered in Britain.

Jonathan Barnard, her defence barrister, told the GMC hearing that she was terrified of him and that he was effectively blackmailing her.

He said the two “had been intimate once, with devastating consequences”. Azari had an abortion in 2002, and Amidi-Mazaheri had threatened to tell the Iranian community. He also claimed to have bribed a cleaner at the hospital where the abortion was done to hand over Azari’s medical records to prove it.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth