In 2023, and after a long and media-covered process, Shakira decided to admit before a judge in Spain the crime of tax evasion and her lawyers agreed to pay a fine of more than seven million euros (more than 32 billion Colombian pesos).

In May of this year, a judge closed 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, this time from 2011.

Shakira arrived with her lawyer Pau Molins at the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia for her trial for tax fraud, in Barcelona on November 20, 2023. | Photo: AFP
And although at first she assured that she would not speak publicly about it, the Colombian artist opened her heart on Tuesday and in a text that was published exclusively by the newspaper El Mundo, of Spain, she did not hold anything back and launched strong criticism against the tax agency of that country, which she even accused of being sexist.

These are the ten most devastating phrases of the Colombian artist:

“In 2023 I lived surrounded by cameras that were anxiously waiting to show the world how I broke down. No one missed a single detail: the tax court trial, the media divorce… it was too juicy a show to pass up (…). 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.”
The singer from Barranquilla, Shakira, posed for the summer cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

“The artificial story of the Tax Agency confused and manipulated two completely different intentions: one was the desire to establish oneself in a country and another, very different, the desire for a relationship that was developing in that country to prosper. They changed 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.”
Shakira and Gerard Piqué
“In 2011 I wanted my relationship with Gerard Piqué to prosper, who at that time was tied to Spain for work reasons, but traveling to Spain created many complications for me, because it forced me to be away from my work centers,” wrote the artist. | Photo: Bruce Glikas/WireImage
“There was a strategy with 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.”
“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 singer stars in a hotel commercial with Lionel Messi.

“A director general of inspection of the Spanish Tax Agency allowed himself to criminalize me on a television program even before the trial was held. Can we trust that an institution will respect our presumption of innocence when it publicly condemns us before the sentence?”.
“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 the tranquility of our children at risk and subjecting us to pressure to break us.”
“I’m thinking about the songs I’m going to write, the tours I’m going to do,” he added. “As a friend says, there’s nothing in the past, we only remember the future.”
“The Tax Agency is not trying to punish those who don’t comply, but rather to show hunting trophies to rebuild a legacy.”

“The public was led to believe that I did not pay my taxes, when the truth is that I paid much more than I should have. When I really had 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.”
“For me, the Spanish decade was a financially lost decade, 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, but today my assets consist of what I earned before arriving in Spain and what I earned after leaving it. Everything I earned in those years was kept by the Spanish State.”
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY – SEPTEMBER 12: (EDITORS NOTE: A Shakira
attends the 2023 Video Music Awards at Prudential Center on September 12, 2023 in Newark, New Jersey. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for MTV)
Context: Shakira: This was the persecution of the Treasury in Spain against the Colombian; from ‘stalking’ her social networks to following her to the hairdresser
“When in 2015 I decided to live in Spain under the expatriate regime, the Tax Agency admitted that during the previous 10 years I had not been a resident, and then, immediately afterward, tried to charge me for those years. What seemed like a polite way to formalize my situation, turned into 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 is touring the world cannot have the intention of becoming a tax resident in a place just because the person they are in a relationship with at the time lives there. It would be the same as thinking that a tourist who is on holiday in Ibiza has to become a tax resident just because she has had a local romance.”