Sydney doctor labels patient a Saudi spy after sexual touching allegations

A Sydney doctor who was deregistered for sexually touching a patient has labelled her an undercover spy for Saudi Arabia on a mission to bring him down.

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A western Sydney doctor who was deregistered for inappropriately sexually touching a patient during a routine pap smear accused his victim of acting as a spy for the Saudi Arabian government to discredit him.

Mr Mohamed Payenda Zhouand Safi’s application to practice again as a GP was dismissed by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal this week, but he continues to work at his wife’s Parramatta practice in administration.

The Afghani refugee accused his patient of being a mentally unstable recruit for the Saudi regime, alongside her disgruntled husband who was resentful of the way Argyle Medical Centre in Parramatta had treated his workers compensation claim.

In 2017 NCAT found Mr Safi guilty of professional misconduct, ruling that during a 2012 examination he inappropriately touched the patient’s vagina before hugging and kissing her and sucking her lips.

Argyle Medical Centre in Parramatta.

But Mr Safi maintains his innocence, and in 2014 he was acquitted of sexual intercourse without consent and three counts of indecent assault at a District Court criminal trial.

He wanted his registration reinstated but the Tribunal has “considerable reservations about Mr Safi’s insight and integrity”, noting he still denies sexually assaulting the woman and was “casting blame on the patient’s mental health.”

In a December 2019 report, a psychiatrist found it “a little concerning” that Mr Safi thought the couple, who he said previously worked in Saudi Arabia, may have been undercover agents on a secret mission to bring him down.

“He had many Arabic patients, had spoken with them against the Saudi regime and Dr Safi believes at some level that they may have been planted by the Saudis to discredit him,” the psychiatrist said.

“While there is a remote possibility that such a situation could occur (given recent events in Turkey); it does have a delusional flavour.”

The Tribunal members were also troubled that Mr Safi thought he’d been punished unfairly, claiming the incident had merely been caused by his failure to obtain adequate consent for the pap smear given the woman’s limited English.

“I do not accept that something worse than a lack of communication occurred,” Mr Safi told the hearing.

That’s despite Mr Safi completing a course on violence against women that he said informed his sense of empathy towards sexual assault victims and their feelings of helplessness.

The Tribunal was mindful of Mr Safi’s traumatic background in escaping civil unrest in his birth country, as well as the steps he’d taken to re-educate himself with online communication and medical ethics courses.

NCAT also acknowledged several character testimonials commending the volunteer work Mr Safi has done in Sydney’s Afghan and Sierra Leone communities.

His former colleague at Argyle Street Medical Centre, Dr Sukanthy Cenan, even spoke of Mr Safi’s high level of enlightenment towards women, “despite coming from a socially conservative cultural background”.

The Tribunal ordered Mr Safi to pay the legal costs of the Medical Council, which opposed his re-registration “to protect the public”, arguing he was not truly remorseful for his attack on the patient.