Named: The doctors getting themselves into hot water in Victoria
From a doctor who couldn’t afford to pay his registration, to a Melbourne dentist who sexually exploited his patients, some of Victoria’s respected doctors have been busted by police. Now, their crimes and names can be revealed.
Outer East
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They’re trusted with our private information and take an oath to protect and heal the sick, but not all healthcare practitioners uphold their promise.
Victorians are being put at risk as dozens of fakes, fraudsters and unregistered medics have been caught illegally treating patients.
In Victoria, 25 health workers have been prosecuted since 2016 for “holding out” – the term health regulators use for anyone practising without medical registration.
Five others – including a doctor, nurse or midwife and occupational therapist – are facing charges in Victorian courts.
Here are some of Melbourne’s medicos before the courts.
Dr Praveen Kumar
Melbourne cosmetic surgeon doctor Praveen Kumar was fined $20,000 without conviction and ordered to pay AHPRA’s $27,121 legal costs in January.
Dr Kumar, 38, performed 33 surgical procedures at Monash House while unregistered, as well as 238 consultations at Cosmetic Ave in Malvern for tummy tucks, breast surgery, liposuction and cosmetic injections.
He also repeatedly lied to his clinic directors when they questioned him about his licence renewal, according to court charge sheets.
Dr Kumar’s lawyer Sean Cash told the court his client was a skilled surgeon and his patients were not at risk of physical harm, but he conceded they would not have been insured had anything gone wrong on the operating table.
He told the court Dr Kumar was under “enormous financial pressure” at the time, in part due to a failed business venture, and couldn’t find the money to pay his $1500 registration renewal fee.
His client was also struggling to cope with the breakdown of his marriage and his father’s illness, Mr Cash told the court.
He pleaded guilty on December 18 to more than 50 charges of practising without a licence.
Cynthia Weinstein
Former high-end beauty doctor Cynthia Weinstein was permanently banned from “undertaking or assisting” with cosmetic surgery in May 2020 after fresh complaints about her work were investigated by the Health Complaints Commissioner (HCC).
Ms Weinstein, who owns CDC Clinics in Armadale, has not held a cosmetic licence for 10 years, but is understood to have aided another doctor with a procedure which sparked the investigation.
But Ms Weinstein rejected claims she acted wrongly, stating the patient consented and that she only helped with “a few minor things”.
The HCC this month found Ms Weinstein had breached the code of conduct for general health services in Victoria and formally issued her with a prohibition order on May 12.
Ms Weinstein cannot “direct delivery of any surgical or medical procedure that involves cutting or piercing the skin, cutting under the skin or cauterising”. CDC Clinics was forbidden from “directing, instructing, allowing or otherwise enabling” Ms Weinstein to undertake or help in any medical or surgical procedures.
Health Complaints Commissioner Karen Cusack said she only made prohibition orders “in cases such as Ms Weinstein and CDC, where I am satisfied that it is necessary to avoid a serious risk to the health, safety or welfare of the public”.
Christopher Bradshaw
Former AFL doctor Christopher Bradshaw, 58, was stripped of his medical licence in May 2020 after he had sexual relations with a patient and prescribed her medications she later overdosed on.
Bradshaw, once the leading physician with Collingwood and Geelong football clubs, was disqualified until October 2025 over his professional misconduct.
A Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruling revealed Bradshaw breached the medical practitioner’s code of conduct by not only having a sexual relationship with a patient but also prescribing her with an array of drugs, including oxycodone, diazepam and fentanyl.
Bradshaw, who also worked with Melbourne and Richmond AFL teams, and with English Premier League club Fulham, had been treating the woman, given the pseudonym XY, for a hip injury since 2008.
Their relationship turned intimate between 2011 and 2016 when he continued to treat her.
First registered as a medical practitioner in Victoria in 1985, the tribunal said Bradshaw should have known XY, who had suffered domestic abuse by her ex, was vulnerable and at risk of developing an opioid dependency.
An AHPRA investigation was sparked when XY’s brother notified them of his concerns Bradshaw was linked to her death in September 2017.
A Queensland coroner concluded the woman took her own life by ingesting a toxic amount of fentanyl — a drug that she was not prescribed.
In October 2018, the Medical Board of Australia referred the allegations to the tribunal.
The tribunal heard the woman’s brother found material relating to her relationship with Bradshaw, including photographs, greeting cards, love notes and records of their communications.
In her diary, she wrote about taking her own life and “expressed the feeling that she had been used by Dr Bradshaw before she was rejected by him and left without medical care”.
Michael Sergides
Fake cosmetic doctor and dodgy massage therapist Michael Sergides, 75, was jailed for three years and six months in August for raping and sexually assaulting a female client at his home.
Sergides was also banned from ever working as a healthcare provider again by Victoria’s healthcare watchdog in June.
While performing a massage on a female client at his Berwick home, Sergides suggested to his victim it was easier to massage her if she removed her pants.
The fiend then “massaged” around the woman’s vagina before raping her.
The victim said she felt “frozen and helpless” while Sergides violated her.
Evidence shown to the court during the judge-alone trial included a police interview conducted between an investigator and Sergides which occurred on August 24 2018.
Sergides described to police how he conducted massages.
“Ninety per cent of people want to take their underwear off,” Sergides told police.
“There’s vaginal massage, there’s also anal massage … breast massage is relaxing for a female.”
In her victim impact statement, the woman said she was scared to leave her home in case she encountered her assailant.
“He took more than a piece of me … I was hurt and angry for a long time,” she said.
Aliaa Sherif
Unregistered doctor Aliaa Sherif, 53, was convicted, fined $15,000 and ordered to pay costs in June for 10 charges of falsely claiming to be a doctor while injecting cosmetic patients at her “Feel Young Again” clinic in Mount Waverley.
Despite a raid on the “Good Life Anti-ageing” business and receiving a cease and desist notice in 2018, the Ringwood Magistrates’ Court heard Sherif continued to inject patients into the new year.
Six months after being ordered to stop, the woman who claimed in advertising to be a “Dr”, a “specialist haematologist” and a “qualified anti-ageing medicine specialist” pierced a woman’s lip with a Botox needle.
The needle went through the patient’s mouth, causing heavy bleeding that later developed into an infection that left her in hospital.
It was at the hospital that the woman was told Sherif was indeed not the doctor she claimed to be.
When the botched patient asked for her money back, Sherif continued to claim she was a doctor, despite having no Australian medical practitioner registration.
She did however hold medical qualifications from a university in Cairo, Egypt.
Panayiotis Marlassi-Bouras
Fake doctor Panayiotis Marlassi-Bouras, 57, was caught pretending to be a geriatric specialist to prey on vulnerable people at an aquatic centre in suburban Melbourne.
He was fined $10,000 and ordered to pay AHPRA’s legal costs in February 2020.
The national health regulator swooped on Panayiotis Marlassi-Bouras, 57, after two of his victims came forward.
The fraudster had approached them when attending swimming classes at Northcote Aquatic and Recreation Centre in January and February last year.
He handed them both a business card, which detailed he was a medical practitioner and aged care specialist at a facility called The Aged Care Clinic.
One of his victims was a brain tumour survivor who he told to stop taking her epilepsy medication “because she no longer needed it”.
He befriended her at the swimming lessons, telling her: “I am a doctor and (the instructor) is one of my patients.”
They then met outside the classes, where he told her that he was “a great doctor” and worked at a Melbourne hospital.
Exploiting her vulnerability, he later offered to help her get her driver’s licence, and set up a better mobile plan and bank accounts, asking her to hand over her passport and credit card details.
Going by Dr Marlassi-Bouras, he also targeted the swimming instructor, asking him about his knee injury after noticing he had a knee brace.
An AHPRA investigation uncovered Marlassi-Bouras was not registered with the General Medical Council, the registration body for practitioners in the UK.
They charged him in October 2019 with six offences, including knowingly and recklessly holding himself out as being a registered health practitioner and falsely using the protected title of medical practitioner.
Raffaele Di Paolo
Brighton man Raffaele Di Paolo was jailed for six-and-a-half years in July 2018 for 51 offences of procuring sexual penetration by fraud, assault, indecent assault and obtaining and trying to obtain property by deception.
Di Paolo passed himself off as a medical practitioner and fertility specialist in Melbourne between 2005 and 2015, but the lies date back decades to his work at a clinic in Italy.
In sentencing him Victorian County Court Judge Bill Stuart labelled Di Paolo a “charlatan who has no insight and no remorse”.
Di Paolo had acquired with forged qualifications to show he was a medical practitioner, an obstetrician and a gynaecologist amid a crackdown on corruption in Italy’s medical system in the 1990s.
Di Paolo was eventually found guilty and fined by a Rome court of passing himself off as a doctor.
After returning to Australia, Di Paolo used the same forged documents to show he was qualified in Italy, also saying he had a science degree from Monash University.
Di Paolo was sentenced in relation to 30 victims, comprising women he treated and their partners.
He told his victims he had worked at the Monash IVF fertility clinic before turning to natural therapies. In fact, Di Paolo tried but failed to join Monash IVF before registering his own company.
He injected women with homoeopathic substances, took blood but never labelled it and in some cases got patients’ partners to help him conduct ultrasounds.
Prosecutors said he fleeced his victims of more than $385,000 but Di Paolo’s lawyers contest that sum.
His crimes were uncovered by health authorities including the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and then police. He was found guilty by a jury of some charges in March 2018 before later pleading guilty to others.
Dr Syed Islam
Former Epworth radiation oncologist Dr Syed Islam was banned from practising medicine for a year in September 2020.
Dr Islam prescribed four female sex workers, on eight occasions, addictive drugs including diazepam, oxycodone, alprazolam and MS Contin, the Medical Board found.
He also forged a doctor’s name on a prescription pad, inappropriately prescribed the sex drug Viagra for himself and secretly slipped it to his then partner.
Dr Islam admitted his behaviour between 2015 and 2018 breached the Australian doctors’ code of conduct but had consistently denied he had given the prostitutes drug prescriptions in lieu of payment for sex, the board said.
Instead, he told the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) he had been unable to refuse the women’s demands for drugs.
This jarred with the evidence of one sex worker, who told medical investigators the prescriptions had been used in contra deal type arrangements, and “other street girls had been paid by Dr Islam in this way” also.
In December 2017 he moved to Warrnambool and started his “dream” job as a consultant radiation oncologist with Epworth Health Care, a career which came to an abrupt end when the health service discovered he was under investigation and made him resign, the tribunal was told.
Dr Islam’s registration had been suspended for some time already but he would be banned for reapplying for his medical licence for a further 14 months, from the hearing date of August 13 2020, VCAT determined.
Nashaat Michael
Melbourne dentist Nashaat Michael, 60, was sentenced to a minimum of four-and-a-half years in jail in November 2018 after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting eight patients and a staff member between 1996 and 2015.
“They were essentially captive in your chair. It was quite brazen offending,” County Court Judge Andrew Tinney said as he handed down the sentence.
In one case, Michael rubbed a woman’s stomach and put his hand down her pants, touching her pubic hair. She tried to make a sound but had dental equipment in her mouth, and pushed him away.
Michael then put his hand down her jeans, below her underpants and made circles of her pubic area, the court was told.
Michael’s offending dated back to 1997 and continued for decades, Judge Michael Tinney noted.
Michael had already been barred from treating women by the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency in November 2016.
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