Dr. Tanmoy Sharma, a former senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, is expected to be sacked this weekend after being found guilty of conducting unethical drug tests on mentally ill patients.

The General Medical Council has found that Dr. Sharma had wrongly recruited patients in unsolicited telephone calls without contacting their nurses or carers.

On a number of occasions, Dr. Sharma failed to obtain approval from proper ethical committees before testing drugs on patients.

After being paid to conduct the tests by drug companies, he failed to seek proper approval from medical bodies and then misled the companies about his methods, The Times reported.

The paper said that Dr. Sharma not only lied about his academic credentials, but was also instrumental in being the leader of a global research fraud in the pharmaceutical sector involving theft of pharmaceutical drug on Schizophrenic patients.

The General Medical Council ruling, which examined Dr. Sharma's research over 10 years, could force the pharmaceutical industry to re-examine the way in which research on psychiatric drugs is commissioned and conducted.

A report by the GMC's Fitness To Practise panel concluded this week that Dr Sharma had put mentally unwell patients at risk and ethical rules had been wilfully flouted.

Dr. Sharma (42), who trained in India, was a prominent psychiatrist who often appeared on the BBC and wrote books on mental illness.