The Colombian pop star said through a spokeswoman that she was “confident that the situation will be resolved in a positive way.” She said that she did what she did because it was legal and because she had legal advise.
A court near Barcelona, Spain, has revealed that it has started looking into Shakira’s second case of suspected tax fraud.
The Colombian artist is accused of cheating the Tax Agency out of personal income taxes and assets for the 2018 financial year, according to a lawsuit from the Prosecutor’s Office.
Shakira was living in Barcelona at the time with her two sons and her ex-boyfriend, Gerard Piqué, who used to play soccer but had stopped. After they broke up after 11 years together, she moved to Miami with her children.
As of Thursday morning, the singer “had not received any formal notification of the Prosecutor’s complaint,” a spokeswoman for Shakira told NBC News in an email.
The spokeswoman said that her legal team “won’t say anything until they get the news through the official and legal channels.” “In strict accordance with what the law says, she must be told in person at her new address.”
Shakira is already scheduled to go to court at a date that hasn’t been set for reportedly not paying $13.9 million in taxes on money she made from 2012 to 2014. The performer has said that he or she did nothing wrong.
Now, a judge in Spain has agreed with state officials to look into whether Shakira cheated on her taxes in 2018 or not.
The Spanish newspaper El Pas said that the court said it didn’t know how much money was at stake because it was waiting for the singer to be publicly told.
“Shakira says that she has always done what the law says and listened to the best tax experts. Shakira’s spokesman said, “She is now focused on her life as an artist in Miami and is sure that her tax problems will be solved in a good way.”
A court in the town of Esplugues de Llobregat, which is near Barcelona, is taking care of both cases.
The first case that will go to court will depend on where Shakira lived between 2012 and 2014. Prosecutors in Barcelona say that the Grammy winner spent more than half of that time in Spain and should have paid taxes there, even though her official home was in the Bahamas.
Over the past 10 years, the Spanish government has gone after other well-known people, like sports stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who did not pay their full taxes.
Both of them were found guilty of tax fraud, but neither of them went to jail because of a law that says first-time criminals don’t have to serve prison terms that are less than two years long.
