An ex-Cambridge academic and convicted fraudster has paid £1 million to the taxpayer after using a green energy scheme to swindle the Government and fund a lavish lifestyle.

Dr Ehsan Abdi-Jalebi lost his fellowship at Churchill College after syphoning off funding grants worth a total of £2.5 million. Abdi-Jalebi used his PhD students’ bank accounts and other falsified documents to receive payments. He then transferred this money to his personal accounts to lease a Maserati sports car and to rent property in the UK and Iran.

The National Crime Agency reported earlier this week that the fraudster has now returned embezzled funds after an extended investigation into Abdi-Jalebi’s finances.

The legal saga was first sparked when Abdi-Jalebi attempted to travel from Heathrow to Tehran in 2015 with a Thorntons Continental chocolate box filled with £100,000 in cash, resulting in his arrest. The stolen grant funding has now been repaid to the taxpayer.

As Varsity previously reported, the former Engineering Fellow was the founder of Wind Technologies, a company that received funding from the Department for Energy and Climate Change, the EU and Innovate UK. Abdi-Jalebi lied on the grant applications and used affiliate companies to duplicate applications.

Abdi-Jalebi claimed the money was being spent on a secret cutting-edge wind turbine in Iran. He failed to produce any evidence for this project.

In his 2018 sentencing, Judge Martin Beddoe dismissed Abdi-Jalebi’s claims that the money was used to build the machine in Iran as “simple fiction”. He had withdrew more than £820,000 in cash over four years and took more than £1.5 million to Dubai and Iran for personal use.

Abdi-Jalebi admitted 13 counts of forgery. He was ordered to repay the funds or face seven years in prison.

The Crown Prosecution Service and the National Crime Agency’s pursuit of Abdi-Jalebi’s foreign assets has culminated in the recovery of £988,411 to the UK exchequer and a further £60,000 from a house sale in Trumpington this week.

Cynthia Caiquo from the CPS said: “Jalebi stole government money, which was intended to provide green energy and help improve the environment. Through our work with international jurisdictions we were able to secure the repatriation of £1m, which has now been returned to fund future projects.”