Sarah Panitzke was held on Sunday by officers
(Picture: PA)Britain’s most wanted woman is languishing in a Spanish prison cell after being arrested following nearly a decade on the run.
Police confirmed on Tuesday they had arrested privately-educated university graduate Sarah Panitzke, 47, while she was walking her dog on Sunday morning.
The property developer’s daughter was wanted over a massive mobile phone VAT fraud in which she played a key role by laundering up to one billion pounds.
She was sentenced in her absence to eight years in jail in August 2013 after absconding during her trial at Kingston Crown Court and she has been on the run ever since.
She pleaded not guilty. UK holidaymakers were asked to help catch the convicted fraudster, from Fulford near York, in a recent appeal for information on the whereabouts of fugitive killers, sex attackers and drug traffickers.
She was said to have “disappeared into thin air” after becoming the only woman on the National Crime Agency’s Most Wanted List.
Now Panitzke has been held by officers from an elite-Madrid based police unit, with footage released by the Civil Guard showing her being surrounded by detectives.
The Civil Guard confirmed they had held her in the small village of Santa Barbara near the east coast city of Tarragona, referring to the captured British national only by her initials as is customary in Spain.
They also revealed they came close to catching her in 2015 in Olivella, just under two hours drive north and a few miles outside of Barcelona where she studied a master’s degree after doing Spanish at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The arrest was carried out by the Civil Guard Central Operative Unit’s Fugitive Task Force.
The specialist Madrid-based unit was the same one that arrested Irish fugitive gang boss Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch last August near his hideaway in the Costa del Sol resort of Fuengirola.
A spokesman for the force said: “The Civil Guard has arrested a British national aged 47 with the initials S.P. in the municipality of Santa Barbara in the province of Tarragona.”
Adding: “The evidence pointed to the fact she could be in hiding in Spain because of her family and academic links that she had maintained with Spain since her adolescence.
“For that reason HMRC in the UK contacted the Civil Guard to help them track her down.
“In 2015 we were able to establish that S.P. was hiding out in Olivella near Barcelona where she was visited by her husband at weekends amid tight security.
“Those visits were designed to provide the woman who has now been arrested with her basic necessities, as she hardly left her hideout so as not to raise suspicion.
“However, during the operation to arrest her, S.P managed to detect the police presence, completely change her appearance and escape.
“From that moment she became a prime objective for investigators, who managed to accumulate a large amount of information about her and put her close circle under constant watch.
“Despite that investigators concluded she had broken off all physical ties with her family in Spain to avoid detection.”
In a statement on the arrest, the Civil Guard added: “In February officers received information about her possible presence in Santa Barbara in Tarragona, a small village with around 4,000 inhabitants. “A round-the-clock watch was established in the area that lasted several weeks.
“At the beginning of last week investigators managed to detect a woman whose appearance matched that of the detainee and then established that she lived in a block of apartments on the outskirts of the locality.
“Given what had happened in 2015, a large-scale operation with undercover officers was put in place and on Sunday morning she was arrested when she left her home to walk her dogs.” The arrest occurred around 9am on Sunday, well-placed sources said.
A source at the Audiencia Nacional, the court in Madrid which is dealing with her extradition, confirmed she had appeared in front of judge Joaquin Gadea on Sunday and was fighting extradition.
The source said: “She renounced her voluntary transfer to the UK, a state prosecutor requested her remand in prison and the judge approved it.”
Her decision to fight extradition means a second hearing will now have to be held which will delay her return to the UK but is unlikely to prevent it.
Initial reports said the 5ft 7in blonde had been held in the town of Vilanova i la Geltru a 45-minute drive south of Barcelona and close to the famous resort of Sitges, although police are expected to confirm later that she was arrested in a village in the Catalan province of Tarragona.
Spanish news website El Confidencial, which broke news of Sunday’s arrest late on Monday, said she was fighting her forced return to the UK.
Panitzke was included on the list of Britain’s most wanted fugitives after absconding in May 2013 before the end of her trial as a senior member of a crime group involved in VAT fraud.
Eighteen members of the crime group received sentences totalling 135 years.
Police said in an appeal in August 2019 she was responsible for laundering approximately one billion pounds. There has not yet been any official comment from the Civil Guard.
Two UK customs officials asked to attend her extradition hearing, according to El Confidencial.
The Madrid-based judge, who ordered her remand in prison while she fights her forced return to the UK, has been named as Joaquin Gadea.
No one could be reached on Monday night at the Audiencia Nacional, the court which deals with extradition issues.
Panitzke, who went to York College for Girls before moving on to fee-paying St Peter’s School which is the third oldest in the world, came from a wealthy family. Her dad Leo was a residential property developer and insurance broker.
She was arrested when she was 19 for buying council houses and selling them on early for a large profit and was subsequently sentenced to four years in prison.
Panitzke was recruited into notorious tax criminal Geoffrey Johnson’s web of 18 fraudsters located throughout the UK after meeting an acquaintance.
She has been described as the launderer of cash from a mobile phone VAT fraud who travelled to places like Dubai, Spain and Andorra to “clean” the money the gang had stolen.
Panitzke was part of a group of companies that bought cheap mobile phones in overseas countries without VAT, then sold them in the UK for a big profit. Operation Vaulter, the codename given to HMRC’s investigation into the fraud gang, led to a trial at Kingston Crown Court.
Her links to Spain were well-known and she is believed to have been allowed to travel to and from her then-home on a gated residential estate in Vilanova i la Geltru where she had been based during her trial.
At the time, she was said to have been living in the coastal town with two dogs and a long-term partner and doing “front jobs” as a hotel worker and property investor. Recent reports said she would face 17 years’ incarceration if caught because her non-payment of a £2.4 million confiscation order meant further time had been added to her prison sentence.
She remained the only member of the 18-strong gang on the run because ringleader Geoffrey Johnson was arrested in Dubai in 2017 and subsequently sentenced to 24 years in prison. In 2016 when she first became Britain’s ‘Most Wanted Woman’, her father told the Daily Mail it was a “shock”.
He died in April 2020.
Her brother Leon told Vice magazine last year: “The whole saga had been incredibly difficult for everyone involved.”
The Costa del Sol was flagged up as a possible hideaway for Panitzke after she went on the run. Police described her in their Wanted Appeal as “170cm tall, slim build with mousey straight hair, blue eyes and a Yorkshire accent.
She was the only woman on the National Crime Agency most-wanted list and had been for most of the eight years she was on the run.
The NCA had said in an earlier appeal: "She controlled the company accounts of many companies remotely via different IP addresses.
"Panitzke travelled extensively to further the fraud to places including Dubai, Spain and Andorra. She was responsible for laundering approximately one billion pounds."
A Google link to the NCA appeal on her appeared not to be working on Tuesday.
