A Spanish judge has ordered pop icon, Shakira, to stand on a trail for tax fraud at a date, yet to be determined.
On September 19, a Barcelona Judge ordered the singer to stand trial for six tax crimes, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday, September 27.
The 45-year-old Colombian music superstar is accused of defrauding the Spanish tax office of 14.5 million euros ($14.7 million) on income earned between the period of 2012 and 2014.
The prosecutors said the pop star, whose full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll pretended to live abroad and used an offshore corporate structure to avoid meeting her tax obligation despite moving to Barcelona after she began a love relationship with former boyfriend Gerard Pique.
Prosecutors said in July that they are seeking a prison sentence of more than eight years and a hefty fine if she is found guilty of tax evasion.
In July, the ‘Hips don’t lie singer confirmed that she had turned down an out-of-court deal after she was charged with defrauding the Spanish treasury.
She was charged with six separate counts of defrauding the Spanish treasury over the three-year period between 2012 and 2014.
The indictment by the prosecutors has been submitted to an investigating court in Esplugues de Llobregat, which has been probing the mother-of-two.
The Spanish tax office had launched an investigation into the matter. During the investigation, the tax officers spent more than one-year check-up on the activities of the singer.
They even kept an eye over her visits to her favorite hairdressers and monitored her social media activities to prove that she spent three years in question in Spain, not abroad.
After the investigation, the officers concluded that the singer spent 242 days in Spain in 2012, 212 days in 2013, and 243 days in the country in 2014.
The report presented by the officers was submitted by the prosecutors with a criminal complaint alleging that the time Shakira “spent out of Spain were ‘sporadic absences’ linked to work commitments.”
