LONDON, Jan 26: A former taxi driver who passed himself off for years as an eminent doctor and psychiatrist, making a fortune in fees and even appearing in court as an expert witness, was jailed for 10 years in Britain on Wednesday.

Barian Baluchi, 43, whose only other experience before turning to medicine had been as a waiter and in a dry cleaning shop, was told by Judge Henry Black sell that the scale of his crime "falls into new territory".

"You are a practised and out-and-out fraudster and deceiver," he said, sentencing the Iranian-born immigrant to Britain at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court.

The court had heard how Baluchi, who pleaded guilty to 30 sample charges related to his deception, had reinvented himself in the late 1990s as "Professor Barian Samuel Baluchi MB ChB MSc PhD, consultant psychiatrist and neuro psychiatrist".

After buying a PhD from the United States, he adopted the identity of a genuine doctor whose official registration had lapsed before persuading officials to change that name to his own.

Once set up, Baluchi earned at least 1.5 million pounds by treating patients. His entirely faked CV claimed he trained at the universities of Harvard, Columbia, Newcastle, Sussex and Leeds, and had lectured on both sides of the Atlantic.

The walls of his clinic near Harley Street were "adorned" with authentic-seeming certificates and even a supposed photograph of his graduation from one college, prosecutors said.

Baluchi even became a recognised expert witness for British courts, giving evidence on cases such as whether a man was mentally fit to stand trial. It was only "through luck" that none of Baluchi's treatment of patients resulted in permanent injury, the judge said. -AFP