Shakira: ‘I was publicly burned at the stake by the Spanish tax authorities’

SHAKIRA has likened her tax fraud ordeal to the Inquisition and accused the Spanish treasury of ‘publicly burning her at the stake’ in her strongest statement on her highly-publicised criminal case yet.

The Colombian pop star blasted the Spanish tax authorities as sexist, racist and manipulative, saying she was ‘persecuted’ by the judiciary system before striking a plea bargain deal last November.

The singer was accused of six separate crimes of defrauding the state of a total of €14.5million in unpaid taxes.

In order to escape a possible eight-year jail term, she agreed to a suspended three-year prison sentence and a €7.4million fine on the first day of her trial in Barcelona.

The artist, who left Spain after separating with her former husband Gerard Pique, published a letter in the Spanish daily El Mundo in which she claimed she only paid the tax settlement to protect her children, and still denies the charges laid against her.

She wrote: “But the most frustrating thing was that a state institution seemed more interested in publicly burning me at the stake than in listening to my reasons. Well, I think the time has come to hit back”.

“More than trying to punish those who do not comply, the Spanish Tax Agency wants to show off hunting trophies to rebuild a credibility in question. And how is that achieved? By frightening people, threatening them with jail time, compromising the peace of mind of our children and putting us under pressure to break us”.

“They wanted to make the public believe that I did not pay my taxes when the truth is that I paid much more than I should have”. 

The prosecution’s argument was based on a rejection of Shakira’s belief that she was resident in the Bahamas between 2012 and 2014 and thus shouldn’t have been considered as a Spanish resident for tax reasons, although she started to date Gerard Pique, the former Barcelona centre-back, in 2010.

Shakira eventually registered as a tax resident in Barcelona in 2015.

The pop star said: “If the singer had been an American man, had fallen in love with a Spanish woman and visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the tax office would have considered that he had the intention of putting down roots”. 

Shakira and Pique were in a relationship for eleven years and had two children together before an acrimonious split in 2022.