One year after she agreed to a deal with Spanish authorities to settle her $15 million for tax fraud case, Shakira is telling her side of the story.
In an over 1,000-word op-ed published in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the Colombian singer penned strong declarations about her war with Spain’s tax agency.
“In 2023, I lived surrounded by cameras anxiously waiting to show the world how I was breaking down,” she writes. “No one missed a single detail: the tax court trial, the media divorce… It was too juicy a show to pass up. But the most frustrating thing was seeing that a state institution seemed more interested in publicly burning me at the stake than in listening to my reasons. Well, I think the time has come to give them.”
In November 2023, after maintaining her innocence for five years, Shakira accepted a last-minute agreement, confirming her acknowledgement of six counts of failing to pay the Spanish government about $15.8 million in taxes between 2012 and 2014. Under the agreement, she received a suspended three-year sentence and paid a $7.6 million fine, according to The Associated Press.
Throughout the letter, the global Latin artist — known for hits such as “Hips Don’t Lie,” “Whenever, Wherever,” and “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” — clarifies her intentions on traveling to the European country, why she reached an agreement with the prosecution in the first place and why she’s sharing her truth now. “Just like my songs, I sing to be able to live peacefully again, to turn the page,” she notes.
Below, see five things we learned from Shak’s personal op-ed:
A “Sexist” Tax Agency
Shakira starts off the letter by explaining that in 2011, she would often travel to Spain to have a “prosperous relationship” with her then boyfriend Gerard Piqué, a famed Spanish soccer player who was tied to the European country for work purposes. She notes that it was also a challenge for her, because it would require her to put a pause on her career and be away from her work bases, but that her intention of traveling was to make her long-distance relationship work, not because she had intentions of staying or have a “vocation of permanence.”
In the op-ed, she says the strategy contained a “sexist prejudice,” and elaborates: “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. There is a structural sexism that takes for granted that a woman can only follow a man, even when it’s not convenient for her. A sexism that survives in sectors of the state bureaucracy in a society that – fortunately – already thinks very differently.”
Complied With Her Obligations
The Colombian artist claims that some technicians of the tax agency presented her as a singer who avoided fulfilling her tax obligations — when, she says, truth is, she always complied with them. She says she paid all amounts, including the fines she considers unjustified, and voluntarily, once she declared herself a Spanish tax resident — and she assures that the Spanish State kept a sum greater than all her earnings from those years.
She addresses: “My finances were investigated by institutions as little suspicious as the White House or the IRS, and approved by other countries of the European Union, and in all that time they never found even the slightest sign of illegality, while a general director of inspection of the Spanish Tax Agency allowed himself to criminalize me in a television program even before the trial was held […] They wanted to make the public believe that I did not pay my taxes, when the truth is that I paid much more than I should have.”
The “Spanish Decade”
She dubs the time she lived in Spain with her former partner and their two children — approximately from 2012 to 2022 — as the “Spanish Decade,” one she also describes as a “financially lost decade.” Though she worked and gave 120 concerts in 90 different cities during those years (between The Sun Comes Out World Tour in 2011 and El Dorado World Tour in 2018), she reveals that her earnings today consist of what she earned before arriving in Spain and after leaving — not in between. “Everything I earned in those years was kept by the Spanish State.”
She goes on to say that when she moved to Spain as an expatriate in 2015, the tax agency admitted that she wasn’t a resident for the last 10 years — but tried to charge her for those years, calling it 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,” she notes. “A person who spends their time touring the world cannot have the intention of being a tax resident in a place just because the person they are in a relationship with at the time lives there.”
Shakira and her two sons relocated from Barcelona to Miami in May 2023 after her very public breakup with Piqué.
Why Now?
Towards the end of the letter, Shakira explains why she decided to make these declarations now, almost one year since the settlement. First and foremost, she says, it is for her children.
“I need them to know that I made the decisions I made to protect them, to be by their side and to get on with my life,” she explains. “Not out of cowardice or guilt […] If at that moment I made the decision to make a pact for my children, this time I made the decision to speak out, because it is what my conscience asks of me,” she writes.
She then mentions how Vivir para contarla, a memoir by Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, inspired her to want to write her own story. “Well, in a similar way I ‘tell it to live,’ to be able to get my life back, so that no one writes my story for me,” she clarifies. “Just like with my songs, I sing to live peacefully again, to turn the page.”
Her Relationship with Spain
In closing, the global star says there is more truth about her in her article than anything published in the media in 2023 — and though she might be judged by the tax agency officials, she wants her fans to understand that “my love for Spain and my dear Spanish friends and family still endures, but not everything is the same. Sometimes commitment to the truth is more important than one’s own comfort.”
