Shakira is negotiating an agreement with the Prosecutor's Office that avoids holding the trial that must begin tomorrow at the Barcelona Court. In recent days, his legal advisers have intensified their contacts with the prosecution in order to seal a deal that will spare him a possible prison sentence and the media exposure of a trial in which there are hundreds of accredited journalists from around the world . However, "the agreement will be last minute and it is still a long way off", say sources familiar with the negotiation. In order for the agreement to come to fruition, Shakira would have to admit the facts, accept a minimum prison sentence and pay a large amount of money in exchange for avoiding the dock. The pact, if confirmed, would be staged during the first session of the trial which Shakira would have to attend.
For five years, the Colombian singer has been very distressed by her battle with the Tax Agency. In one of his last successes, in which he threw several darts at Gerard Piqué, he already expressed the discomfort that this issue caused him: "Me dejaste de vecina a la la sugra, con la prensa en la puerta y la deuda en Hacienda". Perhaps that is why this last week his lawyers, Pau Molins and Míriam Company, have intensified contacts with the Prosecutor's Office, the State Attorney's Office and the Generalitat looking for an agreement.
For the time being, until it is clarified whether there is an agreement, the Prosecutor's Office maintains an eight-year prison sentence for six tax crimes and a fine of 23.8 million euros. The accusation of having defrauded the Treasury of 14.5 million euros between 2012 and 2014. At the trial it will be debated whether Shakira resided in Barcelona at that time and therefore whether she had the obligation to pay her taxes in Spain . The Prosecutor's Office is clear. It states that the Colombian singer lived in Barcelona, since she spent more than 183 days in Spanish territory when she started dating Gerard Piqué and had to declare income and wealth tax. In the indictment, he claims that when Shakira was not in Spain, she was in the US, where she was participating in the edition of the program The Voice, and the days she spent outside of Spain are accounted for. He spent 61 days in the United States in 2012; in 2013, 118; and in 2014, 117 days. The rest happened to them in Spain. In addition, the Prosecutor's Office applies an aggravating factor to him as it considers that he used intermediary companies established in tax havens, such as the Bahamas, to hide his income and assets.
Shakira, meanwhile, denies it. She states that she traveled all over the world and that since 2004 she had resided in the Bahamas because it was "a place that provided her with the privacy she needed, given the media exposure she was subjected to and she points out that it is an island that is 45 minutes by plane from Miami, where his parents reside. He also argues that he has been a permanent resident of the Bahamas since 2007 and until he moved his residence to Spain in 2015, he always complied with his tax obligations.
Despite the fact that during these years there have been approaches to try to reach an agreement and close the case before having to go to trial, they have never come to fruition. After several failed attempts, there came a point when Shakira said enough, she broke off any kind of negotiations with the Treasury and stated that she would go to trial to prove her innocence. "Shakira has performed impeccably in the more than 20 jurisdictions in which she has taxed, and never before has such unreasonable and ruthless prosecution by the tax authorities, nor such blatant use of media and reputational pressure as a collection mechanism", he said in a statement. When the case broke out in 2018, the Colombian singer gave instructions to pay what the Treasury demanded and thus close the case. He paid 17 million euros – amount defrauded plus interest – but the Treasury considered it insufficient.
