After a lengthy legal battle, a Spanish court has ordered the country’s tax authority to pay back more than €55million (£48million) to Shakira after ruling that it had wrongly imposed huge fines.
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The national high court has ordered the Treasury to repay the amount plus interest to the Colombian singer, who recently gave a history-making free concert to over two million fans on Copacabana Beach.
The court said tax authorities had failed to prove she had spent 183 days in Spain in 2011, which is the minimum number of days required for residents to pay personal income tax there.
In a statement given to press, Shakira said the court had “finally set the record straight” after she had spent eight years “enduring brutal public targeting, orchestrated campaigns to destroy my reputation, and sleepless nights that ultimately impacted my health and my family’s well-being”.
“There was never any fraud, and the Administration itself could never prove otherwise, simply because it wasn’t true,” she continued. “Yet, for nearly a decade, I was treated as guilty.
“Every step of the process was leaked, distorted, and amplified, using my name and public image to send a threatening message to the rest of the taxpayers. Today, that narrative crumbles, and it does so with the full force of a court ruling.”
She then dedicated her legal win to the “thousands of ordinary citizens” also being made to prove their innocence at “the cost of economic and emotional ruin”.
Shakira lived with former Barcelona and Spain footballer Gerard Pique for more than a decade after reportedly meeting in 2010 while filming the music video for ‘Waka Waka’, the official song of the World Cup in South Africa.
The High Court said that the fines were unlawful because they relied on the assumption that Spain was her tax residence for the 2011 fiscal year, “a fact which has not been proven”.
The court went on to say that she had spent 163 days in Spain in that financial year, some 20 days short of the threshold for her to be classed as a resident for tax purposes.
The case does not involve the tax years after 2011.
The dispute was one of several involving Shakira and Spain’s tax agency, including a separate settlement reached in 2018 to avoid a trial in a broader fraud case. She was hit with the first set of allegations back in 2021 when Barcelona prosecutors claimed she should have been paying taxes as she was living in Spain for a substantial period between 2012 and 2014.
The second wave of allegations came in September 2023. The Columbian pop icon was again charged with tax evasion in Spain – this time, the prosecutors claimed she had failed to pay €6.7million (£5.8 million) in tax on her income in 2018.
In November 2023, Shakira came to an agreement with the Spanish authorities after agreeing to pay the resounding debt to avoid potential prison time.
In other Shakira news, she joins Madonna and BTS in co-headlining the first ever World Cup Final Halftime Show.
The final will take place on Sunday July 19 at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. For the first time in World Cup history, there will be a star-studded live show during halftime – similar to that seen at the Super Bowl.
In charge of curating the inaugural performance is Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who confirmed its headliners in a recent video shared on social media.
