2023-11-20 21:56:08
Left shortly after without making any statements to the press, the interpreter of “Waka Waka” or “Hips don’t lie” was fined more than 7.3 million euros corresponding to “50 %” of the amount of the fraud, according to the terms of the agreement. She was also given a three-year suspended prison sentence, commuted to a financial penalty of 432,000 euros, the court said in a message on X (formerly Twitter). The total amount she will have to pay therefore amounts to nearly 7.8 million.
Shakira had already paid 17.45 million euros to the tax authorities to regularize her situation, according to an updated figure communicated Monday by the prosecution.
The choice to “leave this chapter of my life behind”
Thanks to this agreement, the singer is spared a long trial and the display of her life spent in the Catalan metropolis, where she resided for years with ex-footballer Gerard Piqué before their highly publicized separation last year. “I had two options: continue to fight to the end, jeopardizing my peace of mind and that of my children, stop making songs, albums and tours” or “close and leave this chapter behind me of my life,” assured, in a press release, Shakira, who moved to Miami with her children after her separation.
The prosecution accused Shakira of not having paid her taxes in Spain in 2012, 2013 and 2014 when, according to him, she had lived in those years more than 183 days per year in the country, the threshold beyond which a person must be considered as a tax resident there. He had requested a sentence of eight years and two months in prison and a fine of 23.8 million euros against him.
The singer categorically denied these accusations, ensuring that her place of tax residence remained at the time the Bahamas archipelago, considered by the EU as a tax haven, because she spent her time traveling due to her career. And this even though she had started a relationship with Gerard Piqué in 2011.
She claimed to have only settled permanently in Barcelona at the end of 2014, just before the birth of her second child. “The tax authorities saw that I was in a relationship with a Spanish citizen and began to salivate,” she denounced last year in ELLE magazine, assuring then that going to trial was for her a “question of principle”.
Other procedures are still underway
Shakira – who saw her name appear in the “Pandora Papers”, a vast journalistic investigation accusing several hundred personalities of having concealed assets in offshore companies – has not, however, finished with Spanish justice. This summer, the prosecution began new proceedings against her for alleged tax fraud in 2018, estimated at six million euros. It is also in the sights of the tax authorities for the 2011 financial year.
This trial, in which nearly 120 witnesses were to be heard, could have turned into a major unpacking of the singer’s life. In order to support the accusation, the investigators had dissected her private life, questioning her neighbors, checking her accounts on social networks, controlling her expenses in hair salons in Barcelona or in the clinic where she was followed in the city for her pregnancy.
A reference in Latin pop music, Shakira was recently in the spotlight for her difficult separation from Gerard Piqué, which she recounts in “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53”. This global hit, which earned him the Latin Grammy for song of the year on Thursday, refers to his “debt with the tax authorities”.
Besides Shakira, many personalities have had problems with the Spanish tax authorities such as Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, who were also sentenced to fines of several million and prison sentences which they did not have to serve.
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