Pamela Gwinnett flew to Tenerife in April 2025, hours after a court refused to change her bail conditions. She had asked for the change so she could scatter her brother’s ashes on the island. Now the 63-year-old is set to be sent back to Britain to serve a six-year prison sentence for stealing nearly £300,000 from an elderly woman in her care.
Greater Manchester Police said Gwinnett has been arrested in Spain, with help from the National Crime Agency and the Spanish authorities.
The theft
The victim was Joan Green, an 89-year-old retired accountant from Chorley, Lancashire. Gwinnett became her carer. During the Covid-19 pandemic she cut Green off from her family, persuaded her to grant power of attorney, and then took control of her money. Preston Crown Court heard that she drained Green’s life savings.
Before she got the power of attorney, Gwinnett made a series of false claims against Green’s stepdaughter and stepgrandchild, including theft and neglect.
The money paid for a car worth £22,500, expensive beauty and Botox treatments, luxury meals and mortgage payments on properties Gwinnett owned. The Court of Protection eventually suspended her authority over Green’s affairs, but by then substantial sums were gone. Green died in November 2022.
Convicted in her absence
Gwinnett was awaiting trial on bail when she left for Spain. She was convicted of theft and fraud by abuse of position last October, after she failed to appear, and Judge Michael Maher sentenced her as though she were standing in the dock.
His words were harsh. “To you, Joan Green was simply a cash cow to be milked until she was dry,” he said. He described a long game in which Gwinnett posed as a benevolent friend while she isolated and controlled a vulnerable woman. “There was in my judgment a self-assured shamelessness to your fraudulent activity,” he said, adding that she had “some brass neck”.
Earlier this year, Sky News confronted Gwinnett outside her seaside apartment in Tenerife. She denied taking anything. “I don’t need to answer these questions. Did I heck take the money,” she told the reporters.
Lead investigator Georgia Loughton said police hope Gwinnett’s return “gives Joan’s family a sense of justice as they look to move on with their lives.”
At sentencing, Maher said he sincerely hoped Gwinnett would be extradited, and that it was “an affront to justice and the rule of law” for her to stay in Tenerife.
Sources
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