Former IT director pleads guilty to corruption

A former senior NHS IT director has pleaded guilty to corruption after accepting payments for awarding a £950,000 contract.

Peter Lewis, former informatics director at the Royal Surrey County NHS Foundation Trust, admitted accepting payments from Richard Moxon, director of an IT company, who also pleaded guilty to corruption in March this year.

A statement from Surrey police said that in 2011, Lewis awarded Moxon a £950,000 year-long contract for a system that was meant to record data generated in the hospital’s emergency department.

Moxon would submit invoices to the trust each month from different company he controlled, and Lewis would pay them out. Each payment was beneath £15,000, allowing Lewis to sign them off without oversight.

In return, Moxon paid Lewis more that £73,770 and an additional £7,200 to a stable to which Lewis owed money.

Detective sergeant Chris Rambour, of the Surrey and Sussex Economic Crime Unit, said that Lewis had breached the trust placed in him to “feather his own nest”.

Trust deputy chief executive Alf Turner said Lewis had breached the fundamental standards of honesty and integrity expected of staff.

“We are pleased that, although it has taken a long time, justice will be served.”

The trust uncovered the fraud while investigating another supplier. A subsequent police investigation found 40% of the software Moxon supplied was not required by the trust.

For the financial year 2011-12, the trust declared a loss of £433,000 for the project involving Moxon’s software, with direct fraud relating to Moxon and Lewis' corruption accounting for £81,000.