Late November isn’t usually a time to go surfing in the Northern Hemisphere, but when you’re Shakira, you make time for the beach. On Wednesday (Nov. 30), Shakira, 45, took her sons – Milan, 9, and Sasha, 7 – to the beach in Cantabria, Spain. The singer sported a navy-colored wetsuit to keep herself warm in the chilly ocean waters, while her boys dressed in black wetsuits when they were out in the waves.
This beach trip comes amidst Shakira’s ongoing $14 million tax fraud case. The Colombian singer is accused of “failing to pay income taxes to the Spanish government between 2012 and 2014,” per The New York Times. Prosecutors claimed Shakira spent more than half of each year in Spain between 2012 and 2014 and allegedly used a previously established “corporate framework” to hide income and assets during those years.
Spanish law says that those who live six months – 183 days or more – in the country must pay taxes. Spanish domestic tax law uses three criteria to consider if a person is a resident or not: “physical presence, the center of economic interests, and the location of a spouse and children,” per NYT. For over a decade, Shakira was involved with Barcelona FC player Gerard Piqué, until they announced their split in June.
Shakira has denied all the allegations and has reportedly paid the 14.5 million Euros that the Spanish Treasury claimed she owed. “First of all, I didn’t spend 183 days per year at that time at all,” Shakira said in an Elle interview. “I was busy fulfilling my professional commitments around the world. Second, I’ve paid everything they claimed I owed, even before they filed a lawsuit. So as of today, I owe zero to them. And finally, I was advised by one of the four biggest tax specialist firms in the world, PricewaterhouseCoopers, so I was confident that I was doing things correctly and transparently from day one.
“Shakira is a taxpayer who has always shown impeccable tax conduct and has never had tax problems in any other jurisdiction,” her legal team said in a Nov. 25 statement. “With no solid evidence to support the charges against her, she has been fiercely persecuted in the criminal and media spheres using unacceptable methods to damage her reputation and force her to come to a settlement agreement.”
