Including fruit and organic products from a supermarket in Marbella (Málaga, 147,958 inhabitants). It is where the Civil Guard arrested in December Edouard Fernando Pinto da Costa, a French refugee of Portuguese origin who faces a 10-year prison sentence for money laundering from drug trafficking. He is 36 years old and his track was lost twice. First in France, where he disappeared while on prison leave in 2019. Later, in 2021, after being arrested in Faro, southern Portugal, when he took advantage of an oversight to flee the police station. After several months of investigations, the close monitoring of his partner has enabled the fugitive from the judicial team of the Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit (UCO) to locate him in Marbella. In the city he lived on the Golden Mile, the most luxurious area of the Costa del Sol, under a false identity: Paco Arnaud Van Damme.
Born in Paris in 1986, Pinto da Costa’s adventures began in July 2016 when he was arrested with 700,000 euros in cash. He was considered an integral part of a drug money laundering network operating between Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, and is credited with laundering more than 70 million euros. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, of which he has served more than four. Then he began to enjoy prison permits, and in one of them he did not return to prison. faded And the court of Marseille in the south of France then issued an International Arrest and Surrender Order (OIDE). He still had five and a half years in prison to serve.
Two years later, in September 2021, the Portuguese criminal police found him in Faro, in the Algarve. Success was fleeting. The man was carrying false papers under the name of Fernando Domingues, and while agents confirmed his true identity, he took advantage of an oversight to flee the police station. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese and French authorities alerted the Guardia Civil that the fugitive might have been hiding in Spain. The Central Operations Unit, together with the Criminal Investigation Unit’s Technical Unit, then began a series of discreet surveillance of various individuals in the Pinto da Costa area.
One of them was his partner. The French woman of Moroccan origin lives in southern Portugal in a villa worth two million euros and soon caught the attention of agents. They checked how he regularly traveled to Spain. He did it in a specific place, Marbella, the usual destination for fugitives from justice because they have the opportunity to go unnoticed while enjoying a life of luxury. The police pursuit gradually narrowed down to the girl. And in December, on one of the occasions, they managed to see her next to her target in the parking lot of a commercial area in Marbella.
“At that moment, the agents identified her and, through physical examination, confirmed beyond any doubt the identity of the suspect,” the Guardia Civil said in a statement. Immediately afterwards, they arrested him in a supermarket. He had a false identity. His driver’s license bore the name Paco Arnaud Van Damme, although his identity was later reconfirmed. According to investigators, the fugitive lived in the Golden Mile area of Marbella, drove luxury cars and his children attended the best private schools.
The escape from justice team that arrested Pinto da Costa is the same one that arrested Sarah Panitzke, one of the most wanted British criminals in the UK in early 2022, after she fled during the 2013 trial. She was in Tarragona and is accused of being a key part of a VAT fraud scheme in her country, where she is believed to have defrauded more than £1,000m (about €1,100m). Throughout 2022, this police group accumulated other arrests such as that of Fredy Castillo Carrillo Pinocho, a Colombian accused by the Colombian authorities of murder crimes and his participation in guerrilla groups, or that of Fernando Moreno Sorni, who was sentenced in absentia to 19 years in prison was convicted. Imprisonment for belonging to a criminal organization and for money laundering.
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