At this point, nothing can prevent the Colombian singer Shakira from sitting on the defendant’s bench to answer for alleged tax fraud of more than 14.5 million euros (about 14 million dollars) to the Spanish Tax Agency.
Apart from a fine of 23.7 million euros (about 23.2 million dollars) claimed by the State Attorney General’s Office, prosecutors are asking for 8 years in prison for the singer and arranger of ‘Bare feet, white dreams’among many other topics.
The last possibility of agreement between the defense of the singer and the prosecutors representing the Spanish State and the autonomous government of Catalonia, was closed in July after the legal representation of the Treasury offered to settle with the estimated fine as reparation.
However, the singer rejected the possible agreement and said that she was willing to face trial and “leave the issue in the hands of the law, with the tranquility and confidence that justice will prove her right,” as explained in a statement released by your news agency.
This week the judge of Esplugues de Llobregat in Barcelona, Ana Duro, has ordered “an order to open an oral trial”, whose date is still awaited and which will mean a media stir given the world stature of the singer and songwriter, who this The year also saw the disaster in his family when he separated from the footballer Gerard Piqué, Barça defender, with whom he has two children.
In the brief, the judge has said that from the decision made to put the singer on the defendant’s bench “there is no recourse”, although sources close to the process have indicated to European media that the parties can reach agreements even until before the trial, without changing the public view.
The defense of the State has considered “serious” the crimes of which the Colombian singer is accused, considering that she used tax havens to hide her income and thereby evade the payment of corresponding taxes for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014 when she already resided in Spain. The initial amount of what was defrauded was estimated at those 14.5 million euros already mentioned.
Given the jurisdiction of the events and his place of residence, in Barcelona, and because the crimes in the accusation exceed 5 years in prison according to the penal code of the European nation, it is up to the Court of that city to air the case.
In her defense, Shakira has said in a statement that the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office “has endeavored to collect the money earned on my international tours and the The Voice when he was not yet a resident in Spain, and they have resorted to improper means to pressure, as they do daily and unfairly with thousands of taxpayers for profit.
Points for and against
The singer’s legal team has made available to the State an amount of more than 17 million euros to face possible fiscal responsibilities, which the State’s representation evaluates as a mitigating factor to reduce the request for a prison sentence.
Until the last moment, the defense of the interpreter of ‘Blind, deaf-speechless’ He tried to avoid trial, but his appeals to the courts were rejected with what the Barcelona Court has considered as meritorious for a trial the accusations of “tax fraud”.
The accounting experts of the Treasury team, crossed all the available financial information, the days of stay of the artist in Spain, who initially claimed that her residence was in the Bahamas, considered a tax haven in the Caribbean, so they counted the entries and departures from Spanish territory and concluded that, as stipulated by the General Tax Law, her home was established in Barcelona where she also had her husband and children.
From then on, the prosecutorial teams that represent the interests of the State began to typify the crimes that were added and the artist had to hire her defense team and technicians to distort the accusations that until now have not been able to vanish.
Shakira argues that she has always followed the recommendations of the best specialists and expert advisers from the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers “and has complied impeccably in the more than 20 jurisdictions in which she has paid taxes, and never had a prosecution been found with such a lack of reasonableness and so fierce on the part of the treasury, nor such an evident use of media and reputational pressure as a collection mechanism.
Stars with tax problems
The Colombian star is not the first celebrity that the Spanish justice prosecutes for defrauding the Public Treasury. Figures of the show like the unforgettable Lola Flores, the pharaoh, they lived it in the 1980s, with public ridicule. Since then the list has been expanded with other figures from different areas of the Spanish firmament.
The Argentine soccer player Leonel Messi reached an agreement to avoid going to jail assuming a daily fine of 400 euros, to add the 252,000 of the fine; plus the replacement and interests of the 4.1 million defrauded, his colleagues Cristiano Ronaldo, Sergio Ramos and other football stars have also reached agreements with the Prosecutor’s Office.
And among those who ventured to go to the end of the lawsuit against the treasury, they have been behind bars for days, like the singer Isabel Pantoja, whose fiscal problems led her to serve 2 years behind bars. However, others such as the former Real Madrid soccer player, Xabi Alonso, came out free from the battle and from paying the 5 million euros that the Treasury demanded.
Will Shakira manage to run with the same fate? Justice will tell.
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