Shakira, through her lawyers, is negotiating an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to avoid holding the trial that must begin this Monday at the Barcelona Court. In recent days, her legal advisors have intensified her contacts with the accusations to seal an agreement that will save her a possible prison sentence and the media exposure of a process for which there are hundreds of accredited journalists from all over the world. . However, “the agreement will be at the last minute and is still far away,” say sources familiar with the negotiation.
Shakira should recognize the facts, accept a minimum prison sentence and pay a large amount of money in exchange for avoiding the dock. The agreement, if confirmed, would be staged during the first session of the trial that Shakira would have to attend.
In the absence of an agreement, the Prosecutor’s Office maintains a sentence of eight years in prison for six tax crimes. She accuses her of having defrauded the Treasury of 14.5 million euros between 2012 and 2014. The issue is simple. In the trial it must be debated whether the artist resided in Spain at that time and therefore she had the obligation to pay her taxes in Spain or not. The Prosecutor’s Office is clear that the Colombian singer lived in Spain, since she spent more than 183 days in national territory when she started dating Gerard Piqué and therefore she had to declare income and wealth tax. Shakira, however, denies it. She maintains that she traveled around the world, that she had residence in the Bahamas and that her tax obligations were not subject to the Spanish regime.
Although during these years there have been approaches to try to reach an agreement and close the matter before having to go to trial, they have never come to fruition. In fact, there came a point where Shakira said enough was enough, she broke off any type of negotiation with the Treasury and stated that she would go to trial to refute the accusations. “The singer fully trusts in her innocence and, therefore, she does not accept compliance,” she said in a statement in which she also said she felt like a victim of persecution. “Shakira has complied impeccably in the more than 20 jurisdictions in which she has paid taxes, and there has never been a persecution with such a lack of reasonableness and so fierce on the part of the treasury, nor such obvious use of media and reputational pressure. as a collection mechanism,” he added. When the case broke out in 2018, the Colombian singer instructed her advisors to pay what the Treasury was asking for and thus close the case. She paid 17 million euros, corresponding to the amount defrauded, which, however, the Treasury considered was not enough.
In the oral hearing, 117 witnesses are summoned with the intention of exposing his personal life in Barcelona with the aim of demonstrating that he spent part of his time in Barcelona and, therefore, had to pay taxes to the Spanish Treasury.
