Shakira, convicted of a million-dollar fraud against the Treasury, published a letter in El Mundo in which she talks about her problems with the tax authorities and assures that she reached an agreement “to protect” her children and “not out of cowardice.” According to her, the Treasury was more interested in “burning her alive” than listening to her.
“In 2023, I lived surrounded by cameras waiting impatiently to show the world how broken I was. No one missed a detail: the Treasury trial, the media divorce… it was too juicy a spectacle to pass up,” Shakira justifies. “But the most frustrating thing was seeing that a state institution seemed more interested in publicly burning me at the stake than listening to my reasons. Well, I think the time has come to give them,” added the singer, who admitted in November 2023 before the Barcelona court to having defrauded 14.5 million euros between 2012 and 2014 and accepted the payment of a fine of 7.8 million in exchange for a reduced sentence that prevents him from going to prison.
The Colombian singer believes that “an institution created to serve citizens should not use all its power and resources to capriciously criminalize whoever suits it.” “But everyone knows that romance sells well,” he says.
In the text, Shakira recalls the beginning of her relationship with then Barcelona player Gerard Piqué in 2011, to explain her continued trips to Spain. “Every time I came back, I did it so that the relationship could flourish, not out of a desire to stay. A strategy in which sexist prejudice is also hidden,” he says. And she denounces the existence of “a structural machismo that takes for granted that a woman can only follow a man, even when it does not suit her.”
The singer believes that some Spanish tax technicians presented a “childish and moralistic story” in which she was a singer who avoided complying with her tax obligations and who were the representatives of justice and decency. “I paid much more than I had to pay,” he says. “If we add all the amounts that I paid voluntarily and the unjustified fines, we will see that the Spanish State kept a sum greater than all my earnings from those years.”
