Singer Shakira -
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Is Shakira as good at music as she is at tax optimization?
The Colombian singer finds herself in any case once again at the heart of financial news with the survey of
Le Monde
and 16 other media on Luxembourg banking activities.
Journalists investigated "for more than a year" in this file called
OpenLux
, to discover that the Grand Duchy hosts "55,000 offshore companies managing assets whose value reaches at least 6.500 billion euros".
Since 2018, all member states of the European Union must make public the real owners of companies in their territory.
This is how
Le Monde
and its colleagues identified 64,458 beneficiaries, including the interpreter of
Waka Waka
.
A good history
She's not the only star whose name stands out.
Miraval Castle and its vineyard, owned by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, are also on the list.
Tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga also gathered some of his belongings in Luxembourg.
As for French personalities,
Le Monde
notes that 37 of the 50 richest families in the country are present in Luxembourg.
We find in particular Bernard Arnault, Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, or the Pinault, Dassault and Hermès families, and Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière, notably known to the general public for his involvement in the financial misadventures of Pénélope and François Fillon.
For Shakira too, this is not the first time that she has been linked to this kind of file.
In 2017, when the
Paradise Papers were published
, she already featured prominently alongside Madonna, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Justin Timberlake or even Harvey Weinstein and Bono from U2.
If the tax optimization remains legal, tax evasion is a little less so for the Spanish authorities, who mounted a case against Shakira in 2020. The singer had declared her taxes in the Bahamas between 2012 and 2014, which would have been legal if she had lived there as she claimed.
Except that according to the Spanish tax authorities, the star spent more than 184 days per fiscal year (the number legally retained to be considered as resident) on the Iberian territory, as relayed
El Pais
at the time.
She should therefore have paid her taxes in Spain.
Loss of income for taxes: 14.5 million euros.
In Nassau in the Bahamas, where Shakira owns a villa which enabled her to obtain a certificate of residence, income earned outside the territory is not taxable.
Remember that taxes are used to finance, among other things, public services, including health and educational services, as well as law enforcement.
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