England’s most wanted woman arrested in Spain for fraud over €1.2bn Abroad

Sarah Panitzke has been on the run since 2013. But after nine years, she could finally be arrested. It happened on Sunday in the Catalan city of Santa Barbara, in the province of Tarragona. The woman is suspected of being a member of a criminal gang who bought mobile phones overseas to resell them in the UK without paying VAT. The tax evasion has earned the 16-person gang more than £1 billion (€1.2 billion), police say.

According to British detectives, Panitzke was responsible for laundering all this money through various gang businesses in Spain, Andorra and Dubai. At one point, this organization sold more mobile phones in the UK than all the legal stores combined. Of the sixteen gang members, only Panitzke remained at large.

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The woman disappeared in May 2013 and was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison in August of the same year. Panitzke fled to Spain, a country to which she had family ties. She changed her address several times.

Police discovered in 2015 that Panitzke was hiding in Olivella, near Barcelona. Her husband would only take her there on weekends under tight security for commodities. She hardly went out herself so as not to make herself suspicious. An operation to arrest her at the time failed, as she learned that the police were on her trail and she managed to completely change her appearance and escape.

She cut off all contact with her family in Spain to stay under the radar. Last month, the police finally found refuge in Santa Barbara, a village between Barcelona and Valencia which has only 4,000 inhabitants. On Sunday, the Guardia Civil arrested her “as part of a large-scale operation”.

The process to extradite the suspect to the UK has now begun.