
Britain’s Most Wanted Woman Laundered £1 Billion and Disappeared Into Thin Air
The National Crime Agency’s most wanted list is a filofax of fraudsters, drug lords, rapists, paedophiles and murderers. As you might expect, it’s dominated by men. But among the 21 criminals on the list, there is one solitary woman, staring out of her mugshot with stormy blue eyes and the smallest hint of a smile.
Sarah Panitzke, 47, has been on the run for eight years, after laundering approximately £1 billion of illicit money through offshore bank accounts. For the her role near the top of a crime group that conducted a large-scale carousel fraud operation, she has been named the most wanted woman in Britain for the past six consecutive years.
James Brooks, 47, met Sarah as a teenager while playing sport against her school in York, St. Peter’s, where fees currently top out at over £19,000 a year. “In netball and hockey, she was an attacker,” says James, who now lives on Spain’s Costa Blanca and works at Alicante airport. “A good team player, but competitive – she wanted to win.”
Alongside her sport and studies – she aced all of her A-levels – Sarah managed to make time for being a teenager. “We’d hang out in central York and go drinking and smoking, and do all the things we shouldn’t have been doing,” says James, who later became Sarah’s boyfriend. “She wasn’t one for going shopping with the girls. She’d rather go and have a pint and a fag with the lads.”
According to James, Sarah had a happy childhood with her brother Leon, and rarely disobeyed or fought with her family. Leo and Paula Panitzke were relaxed parents and built a bar with beer taps, a pool table and a TV at the end of their garden for Sarah to smoke and socialise in. “She didn’t have to hide anything from them,” says James. “They’d advise it wasn’t a good idea to be smoking or driving too fast… but she didn’t have to be secretive.”
“We were adrenaline junkies,” adds James, thinking back to the summers spent at the Panitzke’s second home in Villajoyosa on Spain’s Costa Blanca. “We’d go high diving off rock areas along the coast. She’d be encouraging me to do dives and I’d say, ‘I don’t think it’s the right move,’ but she had no fear at all.”
After college, Sarah left home to study Spanish at Manchester Metropolitan University, with ambitions of owning her own hotel in the future. “She knew her dad was wealthy, and she just wanted to do it herself as opposed to living off his wealth,” says James. “She just wanted to be as good, if not better, than her father.”
When Sarah was 19, a revelation about her father’s success rocked their family. The building contractor had acquired council properties and sold them prematurely for a large profit. An investigation was launched, and Sarah’s dad was arrested and eventually given four years in jail, serving just two.
Family loyalty was Sarah’s number one priority. “Her mum and dad came first and Leon, her brother, third,” says James, who worked in a chip shop and was unable to get the time off work for her father’s final court appearance. “Look, you’ve let the whole family down,” Sarah told James when he revealed the diary clash, before breaking up with him over the perceived betrayal.
Sarah moved back home to be with her mum, Paula, for the first few months her father was inside. She travelled back and forth between Manchester and York, accompanying her to visiting days, disrupting her own studies and social life to be present. When Sarah’s father was released from prison, she re-launched her life plan quickly and left to study for her master’s degree in Business Management at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, aged 25. But somewhere between leaving York and moving to Spain, Sarah became embroiled in a white collar crime of her own.
Alongside 18 other fraudsters from up and down the UK, Sarah established a network of companies that bought and sold mobile phones with a felonious money-making twist. The group purchased phones VAT-free from EU countries, then sold them in the UK for a higher, tax-inclusive price.
The head of the crime ring, 78-year-old Geoffrey Johnson, recruited fellow fraudsters, including Sarah, from Cheshire, East Sussex, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, North Wales, Staffordshire, Scotland and Spain. They were so unconnected that even the authorities couldn’t establish exactly how the mastermind had found his co-conspirators, although there was a suggestion at the trial that an unidentified party overseas had linked them together.
Phones were the chosen commodity because they were small, valuable and easy to take in and out of the country in what looked like a legitimate business. After the goods were sold, the company would disappear without paying a pound to HMRC, in what’s known as missing trader intra-community fraud (MTIC). But the crime didn’t stop there.
The scam was repeated time and time again with the same products, round and round, as if on a carousel. “They were very nimble in their operations,” says lawyer Abbas Lakha, who represented one gang member at trial. “At one stage there were more mobile phones being purchased and exported by a single crime syndicate in the space of a month than actually bought or sold in the country as a whole.”
The gang had access to a banking platform that allowed one person to transfer huge sums of money up and down a supply chain without losing control of the cash. For each deal, the scam would rob the authorities twice. By owning all companies involved, the gang could claim back (never-paid) tax from the public purse. “HMRC didn’t challenge it. They focused on checking if the paper trail confirmed the purported transactions,” Lakha says. “HMRC are completely outsmarted by fraudsters.”
Sarah travelled to Dubai, Spain and Andorra to clean the money the crime ring had stolen. She was in charge of the companies’ accounts, and used generated IP addresses to keep their operation untraceable online.
“She was money focused,” says James. “I think dollar signs would probably have turned her if there was a lot of money put in front of her. She wasn’t greedy, but she liked to have money. She came from money. Not huge money, but she came from wealth. She had a car from the day she first drove. She went to university and never had to stay in halls. She had an allowance, so she didn’t have to work when studying, like most people do. That dollar sign… it would have twisted her into doing something, I imagine.”
By Lydia Spencer-Elliott, Vice News, 11 August 2021
Read more at Vice
Photo (edited): National Crime Agency
Source: riskscreen.com