An NHS director has been sacked from his £250,000-a-year job after it was discovered he was a convicted armed robber.
Craig Alexander, 32, was jailed for three and a half years in September 2007 after he held up a Tesco Express store at gunpoint and threatened two cashiers. But when he was released he was hired by NHS Brent in north-west London after lying on his CV and not revealing his robbery conviction.
Questions are now being asked why NHS bosses failed to carry out any security checks. A simple search on Google would have flagged up his criminal past instantly.
It is believed he was only found out after a member of staff looked him up online after he was rude at work and discovered his past.
Alexander, of Walton, Surrey, was managing multimillion-pound taxpayer-funded budgets as interim borough director of Brent’s Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention budgets.
He was hired through a staff agency and was said to have earned £1,000 a day — or about £250,000 a year — during his 17 months in the job. An NHS Brent spokesman said: “We have terminated his contract.”
