Sarah Panitzke | |
---|---|
Born | 3 March 1974 50) [1] | (age
Other names | 'UK's most wanted woman' |
Education | St Peter's School, York |
Occupation | Fraudster |
Criminal status | Imprisoned until at least 2027 |
Parent(s) | Leo Panitzke (father), Paula Panitzke (mother) [2] [3] |
Criminal charge | Fraud, failure to pay a confiscation order |
Penalty | Eight years' imprisonment (for fraud) Nine years' imprisonment (for failure to pay confiscation order) |
Sarah Panitzke (born 3 March 1974) is a British criminal and fraudster who, until 2022, was widely described as "the UK's most wanted woman". [4] [5]
A former private school girl at St Peter's School, York and from an already-wealthy family, she fled Britain in 2013 while on trial for a £1 billion tax scam, and was for several years the only woman on the National Crime Agency’s list of most-wanted fugitives. [6] [5] [4] [7] She was found guilty of the tax scam and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment in her absence, and was described as one of Britain's most-wanted tax fugitives. [4] [5] In January 2022, she was tracked down to Santa Barbara in Tarragona, Spain, where it was said she had been living a "life of luxury" under a false identity. [7] [4] She was arrested while walking her dog, footage of which was later released. [4] After being extradited back to Britain she began her eight-year sentence and was told she would not be able to apply for parole for four years (half her sentence), and faced a further nine years of imprisonment for not paying back a £2.4 million confiscation order made in 2016. [4] In March 2023, she was further found guilty of this and sentenced to an additional nine years' imprisonment, meaning she will not be eligible for parole until late 2027. [7] Legally, she was not able to be punished for fleeing the country while on trial, and as of 2023, none of the money has been returned. [6] [7]
Sarah Evelyn Isobel Payne was the victim of a high-profile abduction and murder in West Sussex, England in July 2000.
Farah Damji, also known as Farah Dan, is a Ugandan-born British convicted criminal with multiple convictions pertaining to fraud and stalking in the United States, South Africa, and United Kingdom. In 2016, Damji was described by The Sunday Times as "a notorious conwoman", and by some other newspapers as "London's most dangerous woman" in 2021.
PC Sharon Beshenivsky was a West Yorkshire Police constable shot and killed by a criminal gang during a robbery in Bradford on 18 November 2005, becoming the seventh female police officer in Great Britain to be killed on duty. Her colleague, PC Teresa Milburn, was seriously injured in the same incident. Milburn had joined the force less than two years earlier; Beshenivsky had served only nine months as a constable in the force at the time of her death, having been a community support officer before.
In England and Wales, life imprisonment is a sentence that lasts until the death of the prisoner, although in most cases the prisoner will be eligible for parole after a minimum term ("tariff") set by the judge. In exceptional cases a judge may impose a "whole life order", meaning that the offender is never considered for parole, although they may still be released on compassionate grounds at the discretion of the home secretary. Whole life orders are usually imposed for aggravated murder, and can only be imposed where the offender was at least 21 years old at the time of the offence being committed.
Brenda Kim Martin is a Canadian citizen from Trenton, Ontario, whose arrest and conviction in Mexico was subject of much publicity in Canada. Martin began living in Mexico in 1998, working in the culinary industry, allegedly without a visa. In 2006, she was arrested on fraud charges related to a former employer, Alyn Waage. She remained in custody awaiting disposition of her case for two years. The trial and subsequent decision were pushed forward by intervention of the Canadian government and public. Throughout the proceedings, she maintained that she was innocent of the charges and was not implicated by the ring leader, Alyn Waage, who is incarcerated for the fraud in the United States.
Life imprisonment is one of the five principal punishments stipulated in Article 33 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China. In the Criminal Law, there are 87 penalties for life imprisonment.
Yaser Abdel Said is an Egyptian-American convicted murderer. For 12 years, Said evaded arrest for the January 1, 2008, fatal shootings of his two daughters, whose bodies were found in his abandoned taxi cab in Irving, Texas. Said went into hiding after the killings. He remained a fugitive from law enforcement for 12 years, and for six of those years was on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List.
OneCoin is a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme conducted by offshore companies OneCoin Ltd and OneLife Network Ltd, both founded by Ruja Ignatova in concert with Sebastian Greenwood. OneCoin is considered a Ponzi scheme due to its organisational structure of paying early investors using money obtained from newer ones. It was also a pyramid scheme due to the recruiting of investors without providing any actual product. The company maintained its own database of coins rather than using a blockchain and had no mining process which limited its ability to release and circulate coins. Many of the people central to OneCoin had been previously involved in similar schemes and business malpractice. OneCoin was described by The Times as "one of the biggest scams in history".
Crimes That Shook Britain is a television series first aired in 2008 on Crime & Investigation UK, focusing on uncovering the truth behind crimes that shocked the nation. Some episodes were also rebroadcast in random episode order from 2014 to 2019, on Channel 5 originally under the title Britain's Worst Crimes.
Mark Richard George Acklom is an English conman and fraudster who was on Britain's National Crime Agency's list of 10 most-wanted fugitives. His criminal career began at the age of 16 and he has been imprisoned five times in Spain since 1999. He was wanted by Avon & Somerset Police on suspicion of fraud by false representation.
Ruja Plamenova Ignatova is a Bulgarian-born German entrepreneur best known as one of the FBI’s Top Ten wanted Fugitives, and as the founder of a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme known as OneCoin, which The Times described as "one of the biggest scams in history." She was the subject of the 2019 BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen and the 2022 book of the same name. Ignatova boarded a flight to Athens on October 25, 2017, and has not been seen since.
Crystal Mason is an African-American woman who was charged, convicted, and then acquitted for attempting to cast a vote while on federal supervised release during the 2016 United States presidential election. Mason was under supervised release after completing a five-year sentence for tax fraud, and was ineligible to vote according to Texas voting laws. After finding her name was not on the sign-in sheets at her polling place, a poll worker helped Mason to cast a provisional ballot. She was convicted three months later for voter fraud and sentenced to five years imprisonment, a punishment that gained national attention. On March 31, 2021 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to consider Mason's appeal, and on March 28, 2024 her conviction was overturned.
Veronica Anne Packman, known as Carole Packman, was a 40-year-old British woman who disappeared from her home in Bournemouth, England in June 1985. Her husband, Russell Causley, was found guilty of his wife's murder, but her body has never been found.
The abuse of Kylie Freeman was a case of child sexual abuse perpetrated, recorded, and distributed by the victim's father, Kenneth Freeman.
Sarah Jane Baker is a British transgender rights activist, author and artist. She created the Trans Prisoner Alliance to support trans people in prison, and was the UK's longest-serving transgender prisoner at the time of her release.