A Portuguese dominatrix who ran an international sex-trafficking and prostitution racket, earning over £100,000 in the process, has been made to repay just £1 to the public purse.
Fabiana De Souza, 43, and her English husband Gareth Derby, 55, were jailed for a combined 10 years in February last year after they were caught trafficking sex workers from Brazil and Portugal and running a brothel in Harrogate, where many of the sex workers were based after being flown in from abroad.
Jessica Strange, prosecuting at today’s financial confiscation hearing at Leeds Crown Court, said that De Souza, who was excused attendance at court, had made £136,484 from the human-trafficking plot but had just £1 available in her accounts.
She said the prosecution’s financial investigator found that she had no hidden assets.
Derby, who appeared via video link from Moorland prison, had made profits of £28,288 and had £1,045 in cash or assets available.
Mr Recorder R Ward ordered him to pay £1,045 into the public purse but De Souza was ordered to pay a solitary pound.
The former dominatrix was given one month to pay or face a further four weeks in prison. The former sex worker is due to be deported from the UK when she’s released from jail.
De Souza’s barrister Michael Fullerton said she was due to be deported on August 21.
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He claimed that some of her financial gains during the trafficking racket were from her work as a beautician and in the fitness industry.
He said this money was “not…earned by her as a dominatrix with her own website during that period”.
Women treated like ‘commodities’
During the trial at the same court in December 2021, the jury heard that De Souza and Derby, from Norfolk, had been “flying in” sex workers from Europe and South America.
Prosecutor Nicholas Lumley KC said the couple treated the women like “commodities” as they made massive sums from their illicit trade.
De Souza, who provided dominatrix services to people in Harrogate, was said to be the ringleader of the “large-scale commercial operation” in which she and Derby, a high-earning engineer and machine specialist, flew in sex workers from Brazil and Portugal, paid for their flights and met them at airports, before sending them to sex dens where men paid for “massages” and “full (sex) services”.
They had exploited the “vulnerable” women for “significant” financial gain by “controlling (their) finances (and) choice of clients”, said Mr Lumley.
The prostitutes were put at a “significant financial disadvantage” and forced to lie to police to avoid detection.
De Souza and Derby, who ran the lucrative business from their home in East Anglia, were arrested in August 2018 and charged with controlling prostitution for financial gain and human trafficking.
They each denied the charges, but the jury found them guilty on both counts following a 10-day trial.
The charges related to six named women who worked at the Harrogate brothel and two properties in Norfolk between April 2017 and August 2018.
Mr Lumley said De Souza rented a two-bed flat in Harrogate town centre through a letting agency “so it could be used for sex…which would be advertised on the internet by these two defendants”.
De Souza and Derby would pay for sex adverts within hours of picking the women up from airports around the country and would “set them up” at the flat on Bower Road.
The adverts were placed on escort websites and included descriptions of the women.
They took the bookings and “made the arrangements (with the clients)” who would pay various amounts – from £80 for half an hour to over £1,000 for an overnight stay.
Thousands in bank transfers
Between May 2017 and August 2018, some £38,000 cash was deposited into De Souza’s bank accounts at branches in Harrogate and Norfolk. About £9,000 of bank transfers were then made to accounts in Brazil and Portugal using a money-services bureau.
Mr Lumley said one woman was flown in on an EasyJet flight from Amsterdam and was picked up by the couple who had driven from Norfolk in a 4×4 pick-up. Derby also drove a Mercedes.
They would arrange for a train ticket to be available at the airport as they moved the women around the country “or put them on a bus and sent them up to Harrogate or somewhere else”.
Following her arrest, De Souza, who is serving her sentence at a women’s prison in Peterborough, told police she had left her husband in September 2017 with the intention of divorcing him and moved to Harrogate “where no-one knew me”.
She had rented the Bower Road flat for over £700 a month and let rooms out to “others”, some of whom were “friends from Portugal”.
Derby said only that he had an “inkling that Fabia worked at the Harrogate flat as a dominatrix”.
In a text sent to a friend in January 2018, he boasted of being a “smuggler of women”.
Police trawled through the accounts of De Souza and her husband and found they had spent “thousands on air fares” and over £2,000 on adverts alone.
An undercover officer posed as a client to make appointments for the brothel on Bower Road. De Souza would answer the calls in “broken English” and arrange the appointment.
The officer was offered a “range of services”. On his first visit, dressed in civilian clothes, he was met by a sex worker named ‘Lisa’ who buzzed him into the flats above shops.
De Souza and Derby, of Town Street, Upwell, south-west Norfolk, were each jailed for five years in February 2022.
