Scottish businesswoman faces jail in Italy over robberies

At a 90-second hearing at the appeal court in Edinburgh, Dorothy Fasola was told she was being handed over to Italian prosecutors to serve a sentence of four years and seven months for faking banknotes and stealing jewellery in the north Italian city, the Guardian reported. Until last week, Fasola, 59, had spent more than seven years running a successful fish and seafood export business from Peterhead. But the apparently respectable businesswoman has also been named by Serbian prosecutors as the mastermind of an audacious raid on a jeweller's in Tokyo in 2004, when £20m worth of diamond jewellery was stolen, the newspaper wrote. The theft - blamed on the notorious "Pink Panther" gang - included a necklace studded with 116 diamonds worth £17m, called the Comtesse de Vendome. Fasola has denied any involvement in that raid, and neither the Japanese nor Serbian authorities have sought her extradition or formally charged her.