Global star Shakira has an appointment with the Spanish courts on Monday for a highly anticipated trial relating to tax fraud of nearly 14.5 million euros. Summoned at 10 a.m. by a court in Barcelona, the 46-year-old Colombian artist will have to respond to the prosecution’s accusations, which are calling for a sentence of more than eight years in prison and a fine of 23.8 million euros against her. The interpreter of Waka Waka or Hips don’t lie, who triumphed again Thursday evening at the Grammy Latinos in Seville, categorically rejects these accusations. His hearing is scheduled for Monday, during the first hearing of this trial which is scheduled to last until December 14 with a total of nearly 120 witnesses.
The prosecution accuses Shakira of not having paid her income and property taxes in Spain in 2012, 2013 and 2014 even though she had lived, according to him, more than half the year in the country, the threshold at -beyond which a person must be considered a tax resident. He claims, in his indictment, that the singer used a complex set-up of companies based in tax havens “with the intention of not paying her taxes” in the country.
The star’s lawyers refute these accusations and assure that, even if Shakira had started a relationship in 2011 with ex-FC Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué, she continued to move around the world during those years. because of his career. They claim that the singer only established herself permanently in Barcelona at the end of 2014, before transferring her tax residence from the Bahamas to Spain in 2015, just before the birth of their second child.
Shakira “scrupulously respected all her tax obligations in the multiple territories where she had professional activities”, they argued in a writing, recalling that the star had already paid 17.2 million to the tax authorities in this case in view to regularize his situation. This summer, the Spanish prosecutor’s office began another procedure against the singer, whom it accuses of another tax fraud in 2018, estimated at six million euros.
The singer, who moved to Miami with her two children following her separation last year from Gerard Pique, could be excused by the court from attending all hearings. But whether she’s there or not, she risks seeing part of her life unraveled in the courtroom.
Indeed, in order to demonstrate its accusations, the Spanish tax authorities questioned her neighbors, checked her accounts on social networks, checked her expenses in hair salons in Barcelona or in the clinic where she was followed for her pregnancy and dissected those of his relatives.
“Unacceptable methods”, according to the lawyers of Shakira, who also saw her name appear in the Pandora Papers, a vast journalistic investigation published at the end of 2021 and accusing several hundred personalities of having concealed assets in offshore companies, in particular for tax evasion purposes.
A reference in Latin pop music for decades, Shakira has recently been in the spotlight for her difficult separation from Piqué, which she recounts in the hit Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53. This collaboration with the Argentinian Bizarrap became a global success which won the Latin Grammy for song of the year on Thursday and whose lyrics also refer to its “debt with the tax authorities”.
“People on my team tried to convince me to change the words, but I’m not a UN diplomat. I am an artist and above all a woman,” she said this week in an interview with the Spanish magazine ¡Hola!.