Husband ‘tried to isolate wife from legal advice’ in £230m divorce

A High Court judge has found that a wealthy husband deliberately tried to prevent his wife from accessing legal support during their divorce negotiations, contributing to what the court described as an unfair and coercive process.

Liz Wilson, Senior Associate Solicitor in our Family team, reports on this recent case.

In one of the largest divorce awards ever made by the English courts, Mr Justice Cobb ordered the husband to pay his former wife £230,778,588 – around 44% of the couple’s marital assets.

The couple had been married for 20 years. When they separated, their total wealth was estimated at over £1.5bn. By the time of trial, this had reduced to between £460 million and £540 million.

The husband, described in the judgment as a “serial entrepreneur”, and the wife signed a post-nuptial agreement in 2023. However, the judge found that the agreement was “not a complete and concluded agreement”.

Mr Justice Cobb said: “I find that the husband deployed a number of tactics to frighten the wife into agreeing with his proposals for financial settlement in 2022–2023.” He said the husband used “scare tactics” which “cumulatively…had a significant impact on the wife, on her self-confidence, and on her free will”.

He added: “Independent and objective legal scrutiny is an essential safeguard to fairness where parties are seeking to achieve a negotiated settlement of a financial dispute – particularly one of this magnitude. I am satisfied that the husband consciously took steps to keep the lawyers on both sides away (as far as possible) from the negotiations until he believed that there was a signed deal.”

The judge found that the husband “specifically and deliberately sought to isolate the wife from her own trusted lawyer and sought to drive a wedge between them for his own advantage”.

He said the husband “knew or reasonably suspected that [the solicitor] offered the wife not just legal advice but a degree of emotional support too”. The way the husband spoke about the solicitor, the judge said, “had the effect of increasing the wife’s sense of vulnerability at the risk of losing her main source of legal and to some degree emotional support at this crucial time”, which was his intention.

The husband, the judge found, “knew or reasonably believed…that if the wife showed the 2023 settlement agreement to [her solicitor], the wife would be advised against confirming it”.

Awarding the wife more than £230m, the judge said: “I am satisfied, from all that I have read and heard, that the wife was ultimately placed in a position of obvious disadvantage, without the ability to exercise any real self-determination or free will in relation to the negotiations in 2022–2023 on the division of marital assets.”

He noted that had the parties been “properly advised by independent lawyers” at the time of the 2023 agreement, the court would have been “slow to interfere”.

Marital agreements, including post-nuptial and pre-nuptial contracts, are not automatically legally binding in England and Wales. However, courts will generally uphold them if they are entered into freely, with full understanding of their implications, and where both parties receive independent legal advice.

The terms must also be fair and meet the reasonable needs of both parties, particularly where children are involved.

If you would like more information about the issues raised in this article or any aspect of family law please contact Liz on 01228 516666 or click here to send her an email.