Spain tried to ‘burn me at the stake’ in €14.5m tax case, says Shakira

Colombian singer insists she was not liable for vast sum and claims her prosecution was racist and sexist

Shakira has accused Spain of trying to “burn her at the stake” in a racist and sexist prosecution over her taxes.
The Colombian singer was fined €7.3 million after striking a last-minute deal with prosecutors in Barcelona last year. She had admitted to failing to pay €14.5 million in Spanish income tax between 2012 and 2014.
The 47-year-old singer, who insisted at the time she was pleading guilty for personal, rather than legal reasons, also paid a further fine of €438,000 to avoid a three-year prison sentence, which was suspended.
The prosecutor’s office had alleged that the singer spent more than half of each of the years in question in Spain, and was therefore ordinarily resident in the country and liable to pay income tax.
But in an article published on Wednesday by El Mundo, the Spanish newspaper, Shakira accused the Spanish tax authorities of being sexist, racist and manipulative in their handling of her case.
The mother of two accused Spain’s tax authority of concocting a contrived story, and “confusing and manipulating” her tax status to “create obligations that did not exist”.
She added that the institution had deliberately targeted her as a famous person to cover up its failures and lack of credibility.
“I experienced at first hand an institution created to serve citizens [using] its power and resources to criminalise whoever it suits on a whim,” she wrote.
At the heart of the case was the issue of whether Shakira had been a resident of Spain, specifically Barcelona, between 2012 and 2014, during her relationship with Gerard Piqué, the former Barcelona and Spain footballer, who is the father of her two sons.
The singer said that she had spent time in Spain during her 11-year relationship with Mr Piqué, which ended bitterly in 2022.
But she insisted that it could not be proven that she had spent more than six months in the country in any of the years in question.
She argued that she had lived a nomadic life during the 2012-14 period, travelling around the world playing concerts and only visiting Barcelona to see Mr Piqué.
In her article, she explained that she had only been a resident of Spain from 2015, when she started paying her taxes. And she said she had signed the plea bargain to protect her children, “not out of cowardice or guilt”.
Shakira accused the treasury of sexism and racism for penalising her over her pursuit of a romantic relationship.
“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 office would have considered that he had the intention of putting down roots,” she wrote.