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- A challenge to an arbitration award regarding financial arrangements after a divorce. The parties were married from 2005 to 2018. The former husband sought for the arbitration award to be set aside under section 68 or section 69 of the Arbitration Act 1996, and for the court to exercise its discretion under section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 not to approve a consent order in the terms of the award. Ms Clare Ambrose, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, found that the various criticisms of the arbitrator were unfounded and the points raised were inappropriate attempts to re-open the facts. She declined permission to appeal under section 69, and the application under section 68 also failed. She was satisfied that the award was not wrong. It reflected a fair allocation of assets and was firmly within the range of right outcomes. She approved the order attached to the award. Judgment, 08/06/2020, free
- The wife's application for financial remedy orders following the breakdown of the marriage to the husband. Both came from wealthy families. They had married in 2010, after signing a pre-nuptial document regarding the "Separation de Biens". A religious ceremony took place in April and a legal ceremony in July. The parties had lived in London since 2015. Cohen J did not accord weight to the pre-nuptial agreement: it had not been the subject of discussion between the parties, it had been presented to the wife on the day before the wedding, she had had no chance to consider its contents, she was unfamiliar with the concept of choosing a marital regime, and she had no understanding of the implications of the agreement. Cohen J went on to deem 40% of the matrimonial home to be a matrimonial asset. When this was aggregated with the $8m found to have been received by the husband during the marriage for his work within the family business, it amounted to a matrimonial acquest of £7.9m, and a half share would thus provide the wife with just under £4m. The home would be transferred to the wife. Orders for periodical payments and child periodical payments were also made. Finally, Cohen J noted the parties had spent a "deeply regrettable" and "disastrously high" amount of money on costs, and that there had been repeated breaches of the Statement on the Efficient Conduct of Financial Remedy Hearings in the High Court. He suggested that the sanctions available to the court at paragraph 18 of the Statement should not be overlooked. Judgment, 06/06/2020, free
- The financial remedies proceedings arising out of a divorce. The husband was a litigant in person. HHJ Hess ordered a spousal periodical payments order of £1,138 pcm, rising to £1,300 pcm in 2021, and £1,500 pcm in 2027, to continue until the death of either party, the wife's 60th birthday, or her remarriage. Top-up orders were made for the benefit of the children, and child periodical payment orders for the gap between secondary and tertiary education. The parties would each retain a 50% share in the family home. Pension sharing orders would provide equal incomes for the parties at a specified time in the future. Neither party had been entirely successful or entirely unsuccessful, and so there was no order for costs. Judgment, 04/06/2020, free
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Easy as CEV? How to treat pensions upon divorce: W v H (divorce: financial remedies) [2020] EWFC B10In this judgment, HHJ Edward Hess discussed three issues relating to the treatment of pensions upon divorce and considered the opinions of The Pension Advisory Group set out in their report, “A Guide to the Treatment of Pensions on Divorce”, published in July 2019. News, 28/05/2020, free
- The parties lived together for about 20 years before separating, and had five children together, but never married. This was an application from the female partner for an order that the male partner be sanctioned for multiple breaches of a freezing order. He in turn argued that any breach of the freezing order was inadvertent. It was accepted by both parties that the relevant account was left depleted by the sum of £13,015.94. Cobb J found that the male partner's narrative was "simply implausible", and his explanations "contrived and disingenuous". He had treated the account as his personal account. He had breached the freezing order, and the breaches had been knowing and deliberate. Sanctions would be decided at a subsequent hearing. Judgment, 26/05/2020, free
- The father sought permission to appeal out of time against a district judge's finding of fact that he had abused his daughter. Francis J decided that the findings were so unsafe and their consequences so series that they could not be allowed to stand, despite the exceptional delay in appealing. He noted with surprise the district judge's assertion that the mother's counsel could conduct the cross-examination of the expert witness on behalf of the litigant-in-person father as well as the mother, a suggestion which Francis J said was "incorrect and plainly wrong". The expert had not been cross-examined on his misunderstanding of a previous judgment in the case, and in failing to depart from the expert's view the district judge fell into further error. The procedure adopted was irregular enough to cause injustice within the meaning of FPR Part 30. Permission to appeal out of time was granted, the appeal was allowed and the finding of fact set aside. The matter would be remitted for re-hearing by a High Court judge of the Family Division. Judgment, 19/05/2020, free
- Webinar to be broadcast on Wednesday 20th May, 1pm-2pm. News, 12/05/2020, free
- This hearing concerned complex and polarised matrimonial financial proceedings between a husband and wife. She contended that an accountant and/or his various companies owned the ships entirely beneficially for the couple, and that those ships, and the charter fees they generated, were assets falling for appropriate division within the matrimonial financial remedy proceedings. Holman J was not satisfied that there was any real evidence of any deviousness on the part of the accountant or his companies, or any intention by them to try to defeat the claims of the wife. If it was right, as the wife asserted, that the ships were owned beneficially for the couple, then it was in her interests that the current structure remained solvent and afloat. Hence there was no sufficient basis for any injunctions to remain in place, and they were discharged. Judgment, 11/05/2020, free
- Private law family proceedings between the mother and father were ongoing, regarding the welfare of their eight-year-old son. This hearing concerned the disclosure and inspection of documentation from the mother's successful asylum claim, in which she had alleged domestic and sexual abuse on the part of the father. MacDonald J ordered that several of those documents should be disclosed, with some redaction, as being relevant to its fact-finding process. The father had the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, and his Article 8 rights were also engaged. The same was true of the child's Article 6 and 8 rights. It was plainly in the child's best interests for decisions as to his welfare to be taken on a fully informed basis. This required that the court had before it all of the evidence relevant to determining that issue. However, MacDonald J stressed that this decision did not signal any change in the general approach to disclosure into family proceedings of asylum documentation. Rather, this was the application of settled legal principles to the very particular facts of this case. Judgment, 11/05/2020, free
- The husband and wife were the children of extremely wealthy Indian families. Following the breakdown of the marriage the husband had discovered that he was not the biological father of their child and issued proceedings for the tort of deceit against the mother. Cohen J noted that he knew of no other case where the breakdown of a marriage had engendered litigation on the scale witnessed in this case. In this hearing he had to deal with issues including the assessment of the assets, in terms of value, origin and ownership and whether they were subject to a family arrangement or clawback, minority discounts, the movement of resources, tax, pre-acquired wealth, and other assets for which there was inadequate information. In Cohen J's judgment the wife's conduct was so egregious that it would be inequitable to disregard it, but to reflect emotional damage in financial terms would be like comparing apples and pears. Cohen J had also found that the husband's disclosure had been seriously deficient: to reduce the wife's award by giving her a lower percentage of the disclosed assets would be to inflict a double jeopardy. Cohen's J's conclusion was that the matrimonial assets to which the husband could have immediate recourse in terms of ownership were £117m. The wife's assets were calculated at less than £1m. The matrimonial home would be transferred free of charge to the wife. The wife's needs, including the value of the matrimonial home, were found to total £41,046,388. Judgment, 01/05/2020, free