Shakira waited a year to give her version of the legal battle she has had with the Spanish Tax Agency. But now that she has spoken, she has decided to do so bluntly. “In this small article there is more truth about me than in everything that was published in 2023,” she says, at the end of a long letter published with her signature in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

In addition, the Colombian singer maintains her innocence and claims that she admitted her guilt in 2023 for her children, “not out of cowardice or guilt,” and fires harsh accusations against the Spanish agency in charge of tax collection. CNN contacted the Spanish Treasury, which declined to comment on the matter.

Shakira recounts a story that the public followed through the newspapers and that began in 2011 when, as a couple with soccer player Gerard Piqué, she regularly traveled to Spain. According to her story, she did not do so to settle in the country —as the Treasury later said— but rather with the aim of making her love relationship prosper.

“If the singer had been an American man —the artist explains in her letter when speaking of a ‘sexist prejudice’— he would have fallen in love with a Spanish woman and visited her regularly, I find it hard to believe that the Tax Agency would have considered that he had an intention to settle down. There is a structural machismo that takes for granted that a woman can only follow a man, even when it is not convenient for her.”

In January 2018, the Tax Agency reported her arguing that between 2012 and 2014 the singer resided in Spain and, therefore, had to pay taxes in the country on most of her income generated throughout the world. The fraud alleged by the Treasury amounted to 14.5 million euros (about US$ 15.6 million). In 2023, the artist reached an agreement that involved admitting the crime before a judge and paying a fine of more than 7 million euros (about US$ 7.9 million).

Shakira claims that the Tax Agency tried to install a “childish and moralistic” story in which she avoided complying with her tax obligations. Shakira claims that she always complied with her obligations and that her finances were even investigated by other international institutions that never found any trace of illegality.

On the other hand, she accuses a director general of the inspection agency of accusing her on a television programme before the trial. “Can we trust that an institution will respect our presumption of innocence when it condemns us publicly before the sentence?” she asks.

Singer-songwriter Shakira at the 2024 Met Gala celebrating “Sleeping Beauties: The Fashion Awakening” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 6, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images)

“Things are not solved by burning a public figure at the stake every year as if it were an Inquisition process in order to regain lost prestige,” says the artist.

The singer explains that, during the decade she lived in Spain, despite having given 120 concerts around the world, she did not make any profits, because the Spanish State kept everything she earned in those years. “Today my assets consist of what I earned before arriving in Spain and what I earned after leaving it.”

Finally, the singer explains why she has decided to speak out now through the publication of that charge. “The first reason is my children,” she explains.

“I want to leave them the legacy of a woman who explained her reasons calmly and in her own time, when she considered it necessary, not when she was forced to do so. I need them to know that I made the decisions I made to protect them, to be by their side and to get on with my life. Not out of cowardice or guilt,” she says.

In addition, Shakira said that she also needed to make her statement “to be able to get my life back, so that no one writes my story for me.” “I tell it to live,” wrote the singer, paraphrasing the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez who titled his memoirs: “Living to tell it.”

Shakira moved permanently to Miami after her breakup with Piqué, announced after 12 years of relationship, in 2022, and with them she has two children in common: Milan, born in 2013, and Sasha, born in 2015.