Global star Shakira has a date in the Spanish courts on Monday for a highly anticipated trial in connection with tax fraud worth almost 14.5 million euros.
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The 46-year-old Colombian artist will be summoned by a court in Barcelona at 10 a.m. and will have to respond to the prosecution’s allegations, which demand a prison sentence of more than eight years and a fine of 23.8 million euros for her.
The singer of “Waka Waka” or “Hips don’t lie”, who triumphed again at the Latin Grammys in Seville on Thursday evening, categorically denies these allegations.
His hearing is scheduled for Monday, during the first hearing of this trial, which is scheduled to last until December 14 and will feature a total of nearly 120 witnesses.
The public prosecutor’s office accuses Shakira of failing to pay her income and wealth taxes in Spain in 2012, 2013 and 2014, although, according to him, she lived in the country for more than half of the year, which corresponds to the threshold from which one Person must lie is considered taxable.
In his indictment, he alleges that the singer used a complex combination of companies based in tax havens “with the intention of avoiding paying her taxes in the country.”
The star’s lawyers deny these allegations and assure that Shakira, although she began a relationship with former FC Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué in 2011, continued to move around the world during those years due to his career.
They claim the singer only permanently settled in Barcelona at the end of 2014, before changing her tax residency from the Bahamas to Spain in 2015, shortly before the birth of her second child.
Shakira “has diligently complied with all her tax obligations in the various territories in which she has worked,” they argued in a letter, recalling that in this case the star had already paid 17.2 million to the tax authorities to cover his to regulate the situation.
This summer, Spanish prosecutors opened another case against the singer, accusing him of another tax fraud in 2018 worth an estimated six million euros.
Expenses at the hairdresser
The singer, who moved to Miami with her two children after her split from Gerard Pique last year, could be exempted from attending all hearings by the court.
But whether she’s there or not, she risks having part of her life exposed in the courtroom.
To prove her allegations, the Spanish tax authorities interviewed her neighbors, checked her social network accounts, checked her expenses at hairdressing salons in Barcelona or at the clinic where she was cared for during her pregnancy, and analyzed the expenses of his relatives.
“Unacceptable methods,” said Shakira’s lawyers, whose name also appeared in the “Pandora Papers,” an extensive journalistic investigation published at the end of 2021 in which several hundred personalities are accused of concealing assets, particularly in offshore companies, for the purpose of Tax evasion.
“Not a diplomat”
Shakira has been a reference in Latin pop music for decades and has recently been in the spotlight for her difficult breakup with Piqué, which she featured in the hit “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53”.
This collaboration with the Argentine Bizarrap became a worldwide success, which won the Latin Grammy for song of the year on Thursday and whose lyrics also refer to his “debt to the tax authorities”.
“People on my team tried to convince me to change the words, but I am not a UN diplomat. I am an artist and above all a woman,” she said in an interview with Spanish magazine ¡Hola! this week.