‘Everything I earned in those years was taken by the Spanish State’: Shakira breaks her silence on her dispute with the Treasury and attacks the Tax Agency

In a letter published this Wednesday by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Colombian star Shakira said that everything she earned while living in Spain was kept by the Spanish Tax Agency, an institution that he compared to the Inquisition.

“Everything I earned in those years was kept by the Spanish State,” wrote the world-famous artist, who Last year he reached an agreement to plead guilty to tax fraud and pay a multimillion-dollar fine in exchange for avoiding trial in Spain. for evading the payment of approximately 14.5 million euros in taxes in Spain between 2012 and 2014.

In the letter published this Wednesday in the Spanish newspaper, the singer, who had a relationship with Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué with whom she has two children, She believes it is time to break her silence, especially for her children.

“The Spanish state kept a sum greater than my total earnings from those years. It may seem incomprehensible, but for me the Spanish decade was a financially lost decade, and not because I worked little, as everyone knows,” Shakira said in the letter.

It may seem incomprehensible, but for me the Spanish decade was a financially lost decade, and not because I worked little.

The singer of hits like “Hips don’t lie” and “Waka, Waka” He charged against the Tax Agency, “a State institution (that) seemed more interested in publicly burning me at the stake than in listening to my reasons.”

“Things are not solved by burning a public figure at the stake every year as if it were an Inquisition trial,” he insisted.

The Colombian said that the Tax Agency “is not trying to punish those who do not comply, but to show hunting trophies to rebuild a credibility that is in question”and insists that the Spanish State kept a sum greater than its profits for a decade.

Just as he did before the Spanish justice system, The singer denied that she had resided in the country for more days than the law stipulates for paying taxes before 2015, despite having started her relationship with footballer Gerard Piqué in 2011.

“From the beginning I knew that the artificial story of the (Spanish) Tax Agency confused and manipulated two completely different intentions: one was the desire to establish oneself in a country and another, very different one, the desire for a relationship that was developing in that country to prosper. They exchanged one for the other in order to make me a tax resident since 2011 and create obligations that did not exist,” the singer states in her letter.

“Whenever I returned” to Spain in those years, “I did so to make that relationship prosper, not because of a ‘vocation to remain’,” Shakira emphasized.

She also denounced a “sexist prejudice” against her.since “if the singer had been an American man, had fallen in love with a Spanish woman and had visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the Tax Agency would have considered that he had an intention to settle down.”

Shakira says she reached a
n agreement for her children

The Colombian artist stressed that she reached an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to avoid trial, thinking about her children.

“I made the decisions I made to protect them, to be by their side and to get on with my life,” she wrote.

In addition to his children, the second reason he argues for publishing the letter this Wednesday is the need to write his own history, and remembering his compatriot Gabriel García Márquez, She titled her memoirs ‘Living to Tell the Tale’, and says: “I ‘tell it to live’, so that I can get my life back, so that no one can write my story for me. Just like with my songs, I sing to live peacefully again, to turn the page.”

After reaching a court settlement last year, In May, the Spanish courts dismissed another case against Shakira for tax fraud for his 2018 tax return, which put an end to his criminal cases in Spain.

After separating from Piqué in 2022, Shakira moved to Miami last year with her two children.