For the first time since the Spanish Tax Agency imposed a fine on her for alleged tax evasion last year, Shakira opened her heart and told in detail why she asked her lawyers to stop the case and reach a multimillion-dollar agreement with the Treasury.
In 2023, the Colombian artist decided to admit the crime before a judge and agreed to pay a fine of more than seven million euros (more than 32 billion Colombian pesos). In May of this year, a judge dismissed a second case for defrauding 6.6 million euros from the Treasury in 2018. The second investigation into the singer in Spain, opened in July 2023, was closed due to lack of evidence. But, she has another case pending sentencing from 2011.
In an extensive account published exclusively this Tuesday by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Shakira says that in 2023 she felt “surrounded by cameras that were anxiously waiting to show the world how I broke down. Nobody missed a detail: the Treasury trial, the media divorce… it was too juicy a show to pass up. But the most frustrating thing was to see that a State institution seemed more interested in publicly burning me at the stake than in listening to my reasons. Well, I think the time has come to give them.”
From the beginning, says the Barranquilla native, she knew that the “artificial story of the Tax Agency confused and manipulated two completely different intentions: one was the desire to settle in a country and another, very different, that of making a relationship that was developing in that country prosper. They exchanged one for the other to make me a tax resident since 2011 and create obligations that did not exist. Now I understand, because I experienced it firsthand, that an institution created to serve citizens should not use all its power and resources to capriciously criminalize whoever suits it, but everyone knows that romance sells well.
According to Shakira, in 2011 she wanted her relationship with Gerard Piqué to prosper, who at that time was tied to Spain for work reasons, “but traveling to Spain caused me many complications, because it forced me to be away from my work centers. Whenever I returned, I did so to prosper that relationship, not because of a ‘vocation to stay’,” says the Barranquilla native.
It was, she adds, a strategy in which “there is also an underlying sexist prejudice. If the singer had been an American man, had fallen in love with a Spanish woman and visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the Tax Agency would have considered that he had an intention to settle down. There is a structural sexism that takes for granted that a woman can only follow a man, even when it is not convenient for her. A sexism that survives in sectors of the state bureaucracy in a society that –luckily– already thinks very differently.”
In her crude account, Shakira went further and said that “some technicians from the Spanish Tax Agency presented a childish and moralistic story in which I was a singer who avoided fulfilling her tax obligations and they were the representatives of justice and decency.”
“The reality, the singer insists, was very different: I always fulfilled my obligations. My finances were investigated by institutions as little suspicious as the White House or the IRS and approved by other countries of the European Union, and in all that time they never found even the slightest sign of illegality, while a general director of inspection of the Spanish Tax Agency allowed himself to criminalize me in a television program even before the trial was held. Can we trust an institution to respect our presumption of innocence when it publicly condemns us before sentencing?
But, “ The Tax Agency does not try to punish those who do not comply, but to show hunting trophies to rebuild a credibility that is in question. And how is that achieved? By intimidating people, threatening them with jail, putting our children’s peace of mind at risk and putting us under pressure to break us. They wanted to make the public believe that I did not pay my taxes, when the truth is that I paid much more than I should have. When it really was time to do so, I declared myself a Spanish tax resident and if you add up all the amounts I paid voluntarily and the unjustified fines, you will see that the Spanish State kept a sum greater than my total earnings from those years,” Shakira said.
It may seem incomprehensible, the singer reveals: “For me, the Spanish decade was a financial loss, and not because I worked little, as everyone knows. I gave 120 concerts in 90 different cities. How can a person who gives 120 concerts lose money? It sounds strange, I know, but today my assets consist of what I earned before arriving in Spain and what I earned after leaving. Everything I earned in those years was kept by the Spanish State.”
According to Shakira, when she decided to live in Spain as an expatriate in 2015, the Tax Agency admitted that she had not been a resident for the previous 10 years. But then they tried to charge her for those years. “What seemed like a polite way of formalizing my situation turned out to be a trap. In the case of 2011, the strategy is particularly scandalous because I only spent 73 days in Spain, when the minimum established by law to be a tax resident is 183 days. A person who spends their time touring the world cannot have the intention of being a tax resident in a place just because the person they are in a relationship with at that time lives there. It would be the same as thinking that a tourist who visits Ibiza on holiday has to become a tax resident just because she had a local romance.”
