After this summer he refused to reach an agreement with the Spanish Public Ministry, whom he accused of being “intransigent” and even resorting to “undue means to exert pressure”, Shakira will even have to answer in court for the six crimes of tax fraud he is charged in that country.
This Tuesday, the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 1 of Esplugue, in Barcelona, issued an oral trial, which is expected to lead the Colombian singer to sit on the bench in the coming months..
Although, until the date of the trial, the possibility of an agreement between Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll and the Spanish Public Ministry remains open, the artist will always have to be heard in court, the judge in charge of the process: “There is no appeal” against this decisionHe explained.
These are the IRPF and Wealth Tax settlements corresponding to the 2012, 2013 and 2014 financial years that, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, were not presented by the Colombian singer, who already had a relationship with the Catalan soccer player Gerard Piqué (whom she has since been divorced) and will have spent more than six months of each of those years in Spain, which automatically made her a tax resident in the country.
For the damage of 14.5 million euros supposedly caused to the coffers of the Spanish Treasury, the Public Ministry requests a Effective prison sentence of 8 years and two months and forces the singer to pay a fine of 23.8 million euros. Shakira, for her part, guarantees that “there have been no pending debts for many years” and that already in 2018, when the judicial process began, she paid the 17.2 million euros that the Spanish authorities demanded, a fact that the The Spanish Public Ministry sees it only as a mitigating factor for the crimes of which the singer is accused, which he also considered “especially serious” when at the end of July he presented his conclusions on the case.
According to the accusation, the amounts involved and the “use of interposed legal persons” – read tax havens – by the singer, to hide her income, contribute to the seriousness of the case.
As the crimes imputed to her foresee prison sentences of more than five years, the Supreme Court of Barcelona will judge the artist, who remains free pending trial and without additional precautionary measures.
This news comes hours after the Spanish press revealed that Piqué and Shakira, separated since May this year, have not yet reached an agreement on the custody of their children, Sasha, 7, and Milan, 9. According to some newspapers, the Barcelona defender, who would not have liked his ex-wife to talk about the divorce process in an interview with Elle magazine, will now demand custody of the two children.
Source: Observadora
