The singer Shakira lashed out against the Spanish tax authorities, comparing the way the State “burned her at the stake” to the Inquisition. In a letter published today in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, the Colombian singer delved deeply into the case with the tax authorities that forced her to pay a multimillion-dollar fine to avoid going to trial.
In the letter the 47-year-old artist vented about what she has experienced with the Spanish state in recent years in her highly publicized legal dispute.
What did Shakira say about the tax authorities in Spain in her letter published by El Mundo?
"Things are not solved by burning a public figure at the stake every year as if it were an Inquisition process," the singer pointed out. "Everything I earned in those years was kept by the Spanish State."
The composer published the letter after last year reaching an agreement with the prosecution by pleading guilty to tax fraud and having to pay a fine to avoid a trial in Spain for evading the payment of 15.5 million euros in taxes between 2012 and 2014.
According to El País newspaper, the fine was 8 million dollars.
"It may seem incomprehensible, but for me the Spanish decade was a financially lost decade, and not because I worked little, as everyone knows," he pointed out. "If you add up all the amounts I voluntarily paid and the unjustified fines, you will see that the Spanish state kept a sum greater than the total of my earnings from those years."
In the letter, Shakira explained that she did not reside in the European country for more days than required by law to pay taxes and simply stated that she had been traveling to Spain since 2011 because of her relationship with the former footballer Gerard Piqué, father of her two children, who played for Barcelona, the city where he resided.
"Traveling to Spain caused me a lot of complications because it forced me to be far from my work centers. Whenever I returned, it was for the sake of making that relationship prosper, not out of a desire to stay permanently," he says.
The interpreter of TQG described the argument of the Tax Agency as "sexist prejudice" regarding her relationship with the soccer player as evidence of a supposed tax residency in Spain since 2011. "If the singer had been an American man who fell in love with a Spanish woman and visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the Tax Agency would have considered that he had an intention to establish roots," she states.
Shakira also pointed out that she reached an agreement with the prosecution to "protect" her children, "to be by their side and continue with my life. Not out of cowardice or guilt."