One of the city’s top overtime earners was bounced from his job 11 months ago — but continues to collect his $57,000-plus annual salary while on extended sick leave, The Post has learned.
Moustafa Fawzy, the Department of Environmental Protection’s director of hazardous materials, called in sick immediately after he was demoted on Jan. 21.
Officials said Fawzy had accumulated 46½ weeks of unused sick, comp and vacation days under the city’s generous policies, enough to keep him on the payroll — without his having to report to work — until Dec. 16.
As a 21-year employee, Fawzy was entitled to 12 annual sick days that could be carried over year after year.
His medical condition wasn’t disclosed.
A year earlier, Fawzy pulled in $193,625 between his $101,126 in overtime and his previous $92,499 salary.
Investigators didn’t think much of Fawzy’s capabilities in 2008, when the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force was summoned to the DEP after receiving a tip that an employee in his division might be relaying sensitive information to a foreign mission.
The tip didn’t pan out.
But investigators were stunned that Fawzy grabbed the suspect’s computer and kept it in his car before handing it over to authorities nearly four weeks later.
“Fawzy’s seizure and reckless custody-control of the computer compromised potentially serious evidence to a point that, in all likelihood, it would not have been admissible in a court of criminal law,” the city’s Department of Investigation reported in a Nov. 5, 2008, memo.
One DEP staffer told the DOI that Fawzy “operates outside the established chain of command and with little oversight.”
The DOI also found that Fawzy hadn’t completed a required background check since 2007 and had refused to provide a copy of the key to his office to DEP security after changing the locks.
Two months after the DOI forwarded its findings to the DEP — and after WNYW/Channel 5 aired a report about Fawzy — he was demoted and went out sick.
His new salary is $57,050.
Oddly, his office phone is still on. A reporter who called Fawzy last week was able to leave a voicemail.
Officials said they’re constrained by personnel rules from commenting about an employee on medical leave.
All the DEP would say is that Greg Hoag, a former NYPD official, is the new haz-mat chief.
“The unit has been run very well since that time [when Hoag took over] and DEP has full confidence that the public is being protected,” the agency said in a statement.