Pay it back

By Walter Finch

BRITAIN’S former most wanted female fugitive, finally arrested last year, has had her jail sentence doubled after she failed to repay a seven-figure sum. Former private school girl Sarah Panitzke will now

Britain’s most wanted female fugitive who spent nine years hiding out in Spain has her jail sentence doubled

spend 17 years in jail when previously being sentenced to nine.

The penalty was imposed at

Teen robbers

TWO minors have been arrested for attempted robbery at a Palma shop.

The teenagers entered the store in the Plaza de los Patines area on Tuesday afternoon with their faces covered by improvised masks. They waved a knife at an employee and demanded the takings before fleeing with nothing.

Policia Nacional officers went round the district and located the suspects who had the knife on them as well as a wrench, a gas cylinder, and the two handkerchiefs that doubled up as masks.

the City of London Magistrates' Court after she failed to repay £2.4 million she stole as part of a massive VAT fraud scheme.

Panitzke had spent nine years on the run in Spain, living incognito as a local thanks to her excellent Spanish, before being captured and returned to the UK while out walking her dogs. She had been living in the town of Santa Barbara near Tarragona under the alias ‘Maria’, where she had an apartment above an English academy. The fraudster was initially sentenced to 8 years in prison, while being ordered to repay the sum, which was a tiny fraction of the £1 billion she is thought to have laundered on behalf of a scheme to sell mobile phones. Her part involved laundering millions of pounds of stolen money through offshore bank accounts set up by the criminal gang she was part of, which claimed to be importing and selling the phones legitimately.

Monastery Misery

A WORKER at the Monastery of Lluc plundered thousands of euros worth of artefacts and cash from its unique collection.

Police have now returned stolen items and jewellery following the arrest of a museum employee.

The perpetrator is a 56-yearold man who worked at the museum which showcased jewellery and pieces of religious and cultural value.

An investigation began when it was noticed that 50 pieces had disappeared. Some €12,100 had also been removed from a safe.

Police investigations led them to a gold trading company in Palma that had acquired several of the missing articles between March and July 2022.

Despite going to great lengths to hide the profits, HM Revenue and Customs investigators uncovered the complex web of transactions used to launder the stolen money through international bank accounts. These included accounts in the UK, Andorra, Dubai, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Portugal and the US.

Criminal

Panitzke's failure to repay the stolen money means she still owes the full amount plus interest, which continues to accrue at a rate of £538 per day, and has now reached a total of £3,782,779.

Nicol Sheppard, Assistant Director, Fraud Investigation Service at HMRC, said Panitzke’s actions had deprived the UK of vital public money.

“Panitzke was part of a criminal gang that stole millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and deprived our public services of vital funding,” Sheppard said.

Hulking menace

A MAN dubbed ‘the Incredible Hulk’, who has been terrorising the residents, police and even supermarkets of Mallorca during a years-long reign of terror, has struck again.

Weighing in at 130 kilograms (287lb) and a towering two metres (6ft 6), he has a penchant for going on violent, unstoppable rages.

The giant’s latest offence was to steal €40 worth of Parma ham from a supermarket.

It took 12 police officers to arrest him.

This hulk has a taste for robbery and shoplifting, and has numerous charges and court cases outstanding.

His roll call of crime includes smashing up a supermarket that fired him, forcing police to close an entire motorway he was terrorising, smashing his way out of a psychiatric ward, fighting gangs of hooligans, numerous incidents of shoplifting, and a series of assaults on security guards and members of the public, with at least one person in a coma.

His feats of strength include punching through a supermarket window, ripping supermarket shelves off the wall, kicking a hospital door off its hinges and even lifting eight police officers off the ground.

"I cannot understand how this man is still free,” one victim, Juan Jose Martinez, 22, told Ultima Hora.

Martinez suffered a fractured skull, internal bleeding and memory loss from being picked up by the neck and thrown to the ground last August.

“He will kill someone one day, and then we will regret it.”

The priority for police was to retrieve the stolen goods as quickly as possible before they were melted down.

They searched the locker of a prime suspect where they found a box containing old coins dating back to Isabel II, five transparent bags of cash donations and a file containing prehistoric coins and artefacts.