The Colombian singer has already deposited the amount of the debt and has regularized her situation with the Treasury
The prosecutor Carmen Martín Aragón requests in her indictment for eight years and one month in prison and fines for a total of 23.8 million euros for the Colombian singer Shakira (Isabel Mebarak Ripoll) for allegedly having defrauded the Tax Agency 14, 5 million euros between 2012 and 2014. The artist from Barranquilla has already deposited the amount of the debt with the Treasury and has regularized her situation before the Tax Agency, paying thousands of euros more to pay the taxes that correspond to her. For this reason, the prosecution applies the highly qualified mitigation of damage repair, which reduces the request for punishment as a whole.
The public accusation maintains that Shakira has committed six alleged crimes of fraud to the Treasury committed for the non-payment of income and wealth taxes in 2012, 2013 and 2014, and individually sentences of one year to one year and six months are requested. The prosecution maintains that the artist used to defraud a corporate network, with ramifications in tax havens, and that she pretended to live abroad when in fact she was in Barcelona with the soccer player Gerard Piqué, from whom she has now separated.
According to the prosecutor, Shakira lived regularly between 2012 and 2014, first in a house in Barcelona and then in a house in Esplugues de Llobregat, which was acquired together with her partner Gerard Piqué through a company. The singer’s stays outside of Spain at that time were “for professional reasons & rdquor ;, with a very short duration, except for the United States, where she participated in the program ‘La Voz & rdquor ;.
More than 183 days in Spain
The public accusation specifies in its writing that most of the time he was in our country and exceeded the 183 days established by law to consider that a person is a habitual resident in Spain and, therefore, must pay his taxes here. Specifically, the accused effectively remained in our country: 242 days in 2012, 212 days in 2013 and 243 days in 2014. The absences are described as “sporadic”, based on the regulations on taxes.
In its brief, the prosecution underlines that the singer, “knowing that she lived habitually in Spain and that she remained in this country for most of the year”, except for outings to fulfill her professional commitments and leisure activities, used a corporate framework that, although it had been created years ago, did not modify its essential lines and used it to “hide” income and assets from the Treasury and the Tax Agency of Catalonia between 2012 and 2014.
The “plan” to avoid paying taxes, according to the indictment, consisted “basically” in the fact that companies were the ones who formally appeared as holders of the perceptions of income and assets, instead of that of the artist. In this way, most of the funds traveled to tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Panama and Luxembourg, as well as other countries, such as the United States and the Netherlands. In Spain it has two companies, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona. In some cases, the provision of services was simulated.
No means, no staff
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The prosecutor’s office specifies that all these companies “lacked the material and personal means” to carry out any activity and the expenses they generated were “purely administrative”, related to the management of the companies themselves by offices specialized in this type of structure. These companies were “interposed with the sole purpose of hiding” from the Treasury the income and assets of the accused, he stresses.
The indictment comes a day after Shakira’s lawyers announced that they were breaking off talks in order to reach an agreement and avoid trial against the singer, rejecting the prosecution’s proposal that would allow the prison sentence to be replaced by a fine. In a harsh statement, the artist’s legal team argued that this case constituted “a total violation of her rights”, since the vocalist had always shown impeccable conduct, as a person and taxpayer and “a full willingness to solve” any difference from the first moment, even before the criminal process.