After losing her extradition battle, Britain’s ‘Most Wanted’ lady will be transported back to the UK in the coming days.
Sarah Panitzke, a university graduate, had requested Spanish judges to reject a UK extradition request in 2013, which would have resulted in her serving an eight-year jail sentence for a multi-million pound VAT fraud penalty handed down in her absence by a London court.
The two months she has been in custody since her apprehension by an elite Spanish anti-fugitive team while walking her dogs near her hideaway, seven years after she eluded a first police effort to apprehend her with a wig and an emergency backpack, will be deducted from her sentence.
Panitzke’s arrest made news in Spain and the United Kingdom on February 27 since she was the only woman on the National Crime Agency’s Most Wanted List.
Officers from an elite Madrid-based police squad detained privately schooled university graduate Sarah Panitzke (pictured) as she walked her dog near her house on Sunday.
After her imprisonment, the Yorkshire-born property developer’s daughter informed Civil Guard officials that she felt ‘hurt’ to be compared to guys involved to some of the UK’s most awful violent murders.
It was revealed today that she had been hiding away for seven years using a bogus Italian ID in the name of Antonietta Argiulo, despite the fact that the name Maria Antonietta was written on a letterbox outside the flat where she was holed up.
Her refuge was a three-bed maisonette on the borders of Santa Barbara, a little town in Tarragona’s province.
Defence lawyers fought her extradition to the UK on the basis she had strong links to Spain having lived in the country since the mid-nineties and marrying a local man 17 years ago.
They said her husband had a life expectancy of just 10 years because of a liver transplant and would be unable to visit her in the UK if she was extradited.
The lawyers also alleged the crimes Panitzke was accused – and later convicted – of would have been spent under Spanish law in legal arguments rejected by a Madrid court on appeal.
The date for her return, expected to involve British police flying to Spain to take her into custody on a plane at Madrid’s Barajas Airport, has not yet been set.
A well-placed court source said this afternoon: ‘Sarah’s extradition has not happened yet but it will take place within days.’
Panitzke was sentenced in her absence to eight years in jail in August 2013 for laundering £1 billion in a massive mobile phone VAT fraud after vanishing during her trial at Kingston Crown Court.
The Spanish and Catalan-speaking brunette, who went to the prestigious fee-paying St Peter’s School in York before studying Spanish at university, vanished into thin air while on trial for money laundering in May 2013.
She was convicted in her absence of laundering money through companies in Spain, Andorra and Dubai for a crime group that bought mobile phones abroad without VAT and resold them in the UK.
Panitzke was recruited into notorious tax criminal Geoffrey Johnson’s web of fraudsters located throughout the UK after meeting an acquaintance.
She remained the only member of the 18-strong gang on the run because ringleader Johnson was arrested in Dubai in 2017 and subsequently sentenced to 24 years in prison.
The head of the elite Civil Guard team tasked with leading the operation to catch Panitzke, called the Civil Guard Central Operative Unit’s Fugitive Task Force, said after the arrest: ‘Sarah told us in the car on the way to Barcelona after her arrest it had hurt her a lot that her mugshot had been included alongside all the men linked to violent and despicable crimes on the National Crime Agency’s Wanted List.
‘She also claimed she had wanted to hand herself in but had never found the right opportunity.
‘She said she felt she had already done her time because she had been living in almost total isolation for several years cut off from family and friends.
‘Her father died while she was on the run and she didn’t go to his funeral.
‘We asked Sarah why she had never been to visit him and she told us that while he was alive he made it clear he preferred not to see her than see her in jail.
She also complained she was only able to buy a cheap gin for her gin and tonics as her money started to run out and not the more expensive gin she had always enjoyed.
‘It was a case of: ‘I used to have a great life and now the life I lead is pitiful.’
Neighbours in Santa Barbara said she would go swimming in the apartment block’s community pool during the quiet lunchtime hours but lived a very discreet life and rarely invited anyone into her home.
One of the officers involved in her arrest was an undercover cop who seven years earlier had inadvertently aroused her suspicions as he walked past her previous hideaway to get a closer look at her and try to confirm her ID.
She ended up fleeing with a wig and emergency rucksack and staying on the run for another seven years.
Spanish police said after her detention she appeared to be continuing to protest her innocence despite her arrest, telling officers who accompanied her in the car-ride to Barcelona to be fingerprinted where she opened up after years of silence: ‘She said the ringleader was the one who was guilty of everything and she hadn’t done anything wrong and was not to blame.
‘She called him the ‘fat b*****d’ who had got her caught up in all of this.
‘It’s a story we’re used to hearing when we arrest people who are on the run.
‘There was a moment when she got a bit emotional but there wasn’t a flood of tears. I think it was more a question of her feeling relieved after going so long without speaking to anyone and suddenly seeing a lot of people focusing on her.’
A source said at the time: ‘Physically she looks British or someone who wasn’t a local at least.
‘But her command of both Catalan and Castilian Spanish meant she didn’t fit the stereotype of the average British fugitive at all.’
The fraudster’s mum, 77-year-old widow Pauline Panitzke, reacted to news of her daughter’s arrest at her home in the sleepy village of Market Weighton, east Yorks, by saying: ‘At least, I know she is safe and well.’