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Spain Prosecutors call for Eight Years sentence for Shakira
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Shakira may face an eight-year jail term for Tax Evasion
Spanish prosecutors announced Friday that they would seek a prison sentence of more than eight years for worldwide music diva Shakira after she rejected a plea agreement on tax evasion allegations.
Prosecutors in Barcelona will also seek a fine of roughly 24 million euros ($24.5 million) on the 45-year-old “Hips Don’t Lie” singer, accusing her of cheating the Spanish tax office out of 14.5 million euros earned between 2012 and 2014.
The court must now choose whether to convene a trial and establish a date for it.
Shakira, who has sold over 60 million albums, rejected a plea deal on Wednesday, saying in a statement through her lawyers that she was “absolutely certain of her innocence” and had decided to let the case go to court, “confident” that her innocence would be proven.
Shakira has slammed the “complete violation of her rights” and “abusive methods” by the prosecutors and said they were “insisting on claiming money earned during my international tours and the show ‘The Voice” on which she was a judge in the United States when she was “not yet resident in Spain”.
Shakira was on the singing competition show between 2013 and 2014.
Shakira’s defence team argues she moved to Spain full-time only in 2015 and has met all tax obligations.
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She says she has paid 17.2 million euros to the Spanish tax authorities and she has “no debt to the treasury for many years”
A Barcelona court in May dismissed an appeal from the singer to drop the charges.
Shakira was named in one of the largest ever leaks of financial documents in October 2021, known as the “Pandora Papers”, among public figures linked to offshore assets.
With her mix of Latin and Arabic rhythms and rock influence, three-time Grammy winner Shakira scored major global hits with songs such as “Hips don’t Lie”, “Whenever, Wherever” and “Waka Waka”, the official song of the 2010 World Cup.