Madrid, Sep 4 (EFE).- Colombian singer Shakira, embroiled in a long-standing dispute with the Spanish Treasury over accusations of defrauding over $16 million during her time in Spain, has said she settled the case not out of “cowardice” or “guilt,” but “to protect” her children.
Shakira reached an agreement in May that resolved the criminal cases she faced in Spain for tax fraud.
The first of these led to a trial in November last year, where the artist agreed to pay a 7.8 million euros fine ($8.3 million) in a deal with the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Tax Agency, preventing her from going to prison after admitting to defrauding €14.5 million (over $16 million) between 2012 and 2014.
In a letter published Wednesday in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the singer, who shares two children with former Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué, said it was time to break her silence, primarily for the sake of her children.
“I need them to know that I made the decisions I made to protect them, to be by their side and continue with my life. Not out of cowardice or guilt,” she wrote.
Shakira argued that the Spanish Tax Agency “fabricated” the narrative, and confused and manipulated her two completely different intentions.
“One was the desire to settle in a country, and the other, very different, was the desire for a relationship to flourish in that country. They conflated the two to turn me into a tax resident since 2011, and create obligations that didn’t exist.”
She justifies her trips and stays in Spain as efforts to nurture her relationship with Piqué, despite being away from her professional commitments.
“Whenever I returned, it was to make that relationship thrive, not out of a ‘desire for permanence’,” she says.
Shakira also believes her case is tainted by “an underlying sexist prejudice.”
“If the singer had been an American man who fell in love with a Spanish woman and visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the Tax Agency would have considered he intended to establish roots.
“This sexism persists in sectors of state bureaucracy in a society that —fortunately —thinks very differently today.”
Currently residing in Miami, Shakira insists that she has always fulfilled her obligations.
“My finances were investigated by institutions as unlikely to overlook wrongdoing as the White House or the IRS, and approved by other European Union countries, and in all that time, they never found even the slightest sign of illegality.”
She accuses the Tax Agency of not being interested in punishing those who don’t comply. “It wants to display hunting trophies to rebuild its shaky credibility.”
She also claims that the Spanish state retained more than what she earned over a decade.
The second reason for publishing the letter was to “write my own story.”
She recalled her “dear friend” Gabriel García Márquez’s memoirs “Living to Tell the Tale.”
“Literature was so important to him that he thought he lived to be able to tell. Well, similarly, I ‘tell it to live,’ to be able to reclaim my life, so that no one else writes my story for me. Just like with my songs, I sing to live peacefully again, to turn the page.”
“There is more truth about me than in everything that was published in 2023,” she concludes. EFE