I’m getting married, how can I protect my assets? I am getting married in May and have two children from a previous marriage. My estate is worth about £850,000 and I would like to know the best way of protecting it. I would like all my assets apart from my family home to pass to…
In a case dubbed the ‘meal ticket for life’, the Court of Appeal this week ruled that maintenance payments for Kim Waggott from her ex-husband should end after three years. Mrs Waggott had been awarded a settlement of £9.76m and £175,000 in annual maintenance payments for life, after she was divorced from her multi-millionaire husband…
The end of the tax season and divorce: are your financial assets protected? Partner Hazel Wright discusses how the timing of divorce impacts tax payments. “Divorce Day” falls on the first working Monday in January (in 2018, this was 8th January), when the Press tell us that there is a spike in initial enquiries to…
83-year-old jailed for contempt over divorce settlement An 83-year-old businessman has been jailed for 14 months for ‘serious contempt’ after his ex-wife was awarded £3.5m in their divorce settlement. His Honour Judge Wildblood QC, in sentencing remarks published yesterday, said John Ralph Hart ‘is a man who has received repeated warnings already that he must comply with…
It is that time of year: people are returning from fraught winter breaks, giving up on their marriages and filing for divorce. In the trauma that often ensues, the focus is usually on who gets the house, but matters become more complicated when it comes to who gets the luxury assets — such as the…
Another Russian oligarch was in court this week, claiming that he could “not get justice in Britain”. Farkhad Akhmedov, 61, was determined to keep his £453 million fortune out of the reach of his former wife, Tatiana, but the Court of Appeal judges on Tuesday, 28 February agreed that his solicitor was rightly ordered to…
Bitcoin Bitterness Starts to Make Messy Divorces Even Worse Divorces are messy, and cryptocurrencies are helping to make them a whole lot more so. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are a new challenge for lawyers, plagued with volatility and secrecy that is extending the already painful process of dividing a couple’s assets. The…
‘Anyone can live on £90m’ This is an understandable human reaction to learning that Camilla Versteegh is asking the Court of Appeal to increase her original award of £90m by a further £25m. However, with assets totaling £230m, there needs to have been a jurisprudential reason why she did not receive the half of the…
Would Austenian characters be persuaded with pre-nups? Jane Austen fans believe that her plots of love, marriage and money are as relevant today as they were in the 18th century, but would any of her characters, really have got a pre-nup? Marriage looks very different in the 21st century than it did in the 18th. By way of…
Keeping it simple: divorce in our digital age Things were different then. By ‘then’ I mean in 1969, when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. It is incredible that we still use the same set of ‘facts’ to prove that a marriage has irretrievably broken down. In 1996, the law very nearly changed to allow…
