A Spanish court announced on Thursday that it had filed a second case on charges of tax fraud against the singer Shakira, thus ending the international star’s problems in the country in which she resided for a long time.
After a request from the public prosecutor announced on Wednesday, this court located on the outskirts of Barcelona decided that the Colombian artist had committed “irregularities” in her tax declaration for the year 2018, with lost profits of approximately 6 million euros to the Spanish tax authorities.
However, “these violations are not sufficient to constitute a (criminal) crime against the tax administration,” according to the judge responsible for the case, who considered that the star, whose credits are filled with dozens of hit songs, did not have a “desire to evade taxes.”
For its part, the Public Prosecution ruled that there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute Shakira criminally in this case.
This court announced in July that it had opened this judicial procedure against the singer, who is suspected of using companies based in tax havens to avoid paying the entire income and wealth tax in 2018.
In an effort to show her desire to settle her situation with the tax authorities, Shakira paid 6.6 million euros to the courts in August, including 6 million euros owed to the tax authorities, in addition to late payment interest and settlement fees.
Shakira is still subject to the supervision of the Spanish tax authorities for the year 2011, but this procedure is only administrative and not judicial.
Avoid trial
The singer had already avoided a trial that would have been an embarrassment to her at the end of 2023 before a Barcelona court, as part of the first prosecutions on charges of tax fraud.
In this separate case, the prosecution accused her of not paying her taxes in Spain in 2012, 2013 and 2014, even though in those years she lived more than 183 days each year in the country, which is the minimum at which a person is considered a tax resident in the country.
The Public Prosecution requested a sentence of 8 years and two months in prison, and a fine of 23.8 million euros.
For her part, the singer categorically denied these accusations, stressing that even if she had begun a relationship in 2011 with former FC Barcelona player Gerard Pique, she continued to move around the world in those years, by virtue of her artistic activities.
She said she settled permanently in Barcelona only at the end of 2014, before moving her tax residency from the Bahamas to Spain in 2015, just before the birth of her second child.
Shakira was summoned to court in November to stand trial, but she reached a last-minute agreement with the prosecution, thus avoiding a trial during which many details of her private life would have been revealed.
According to this agreement, Shakira was sentenced to pay a fine of more than 7.3 million euros, equivalent to “50%” of the value of the taxes that she is accused of evading, and she had already paid 17.45 million euros to the tax authorities to settle her situation in this regard.
Shakira’s name appeared in the “Pandora Papers”, a broad journalistic investigation accusing hundreds of figures of hiding assets in offshore companies. She separated from Gerard Pique in 2022 and has since settled with her two children in Miami.
