The 29-year-old turned his back on finance and armed with a diploma from Britain's elite Oxford University knocked up on his home computer landed himself a new job at the Erlangen university clinic in Bavaria.

Taken on as a trainee doctor, he took part in 190 operations including 17 organ operations, the Bild newspaper said, and according to a spokesman for the clinic he nearly got away with it.

'The head of the clinic never noticed anything out of the ordinary with his work. No one would have noticed (that he was an imposter) if it hadn't been for an anonymous tip-off,' spokesman Johannes Eissing told AFP.

Separately on Wednesday a court in Hamburg handed down an 18-month suspended jail sentence to a 34-year-old woman with forged medical qualifications who practised as a paediatrician for four and half years. -- AFP