It should go without saying that when you are involved in financial remedy proceedings on divorce (or, indeed, in any type of court proceedings) you should comply with all orders and requirements of the court, and generally conduct yourself in an honest and cooperative fashion.
If you do not do these things then, as we will see in a moment, you are likely at the very least to be the subject of judicial disapproval.
But the outcome for you could be considerably worse than that, as was demonstrated in the recent case VTY v GDB, which took place in the Central Family Court in London.
The case concerned a wife’s financial remedies application.
‘Obfuscatory disclosure’
The background to the case was as follows. The parties married in 1999, and had three children, respectively aged 23, 22 and 16. The husband had been the breadwinner and the wife had been the homemaker – roles that, as the judge pointed out, are equal in law.
The husband was a self-employed financial consultant, trading in shares and investing in properties. He had been hugely successful over the course of the marriage, as a result of which the parties had enjoyed a high standard of living.
In 2022 the wife found out that the husband had been having an affair. The parties did not immediately separate, but about a year later the wife decided that she wanted a divorce. Divorce proceedings were issued, and in October 2023 the wife made her financial remedies application.
The application was not straightforward.
In 2024 the wife applied for maintenance pending suit (i.e. an interim maintenance order), to last until the final hearing of the financial remedies application. In June 2024 the court ordered the husband to pay to the wife the sum of £3,000 per calendar month, as well as paying the outgoings on the former matrimonial home. The husband failed to comply with this order, claiming that he had no funds.
The husband also failed to comply with other orders of the court relating to the valuation of matrimonial assets.
Perhaps more seriously, the husband failed to make full disclosure of his assets, as the court had ordered him to do. The judge stated that the husband had “engaged in a frustrating and confounding process of obfuscatory disclosure”, that was never complete.
Despite this, the case proceeded to a final hearing.
Egregious and dishonest
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the judge formed a very dim view of the husband, commenting upon his evidence at the final hearing by saying that: “On occasions too frequent for the court to do justice to here, the husband has been demonstrated to not be telling the truth.”
The judge also found that, since the parties separated, the husband had spent “an obscene amount of money” on clothes (including £800 on a belt and £2,500 on a coat), sportswear and luxury personal grooming. He also spent €2,137 on a clutch/wallet for what he described as a delayed birthday present for the wife of a friend. Despite this, he pleaded poverty, and failed to pay the maintenance, with the result that there was some £48,500 arrears outstanding under the maintenance order.
In short, the judge stated that the husband had been “thoroughly and determinedly dishonest” and had “defied court orders with impunity.”
Again unsurprisingly, the husband’s conduct had a considerable bearing upon the outcome of the case. The judge found that in conducting himself in this way the husband had “done himself absolutely no favours at all”, and said that, “The consequences of this sorry state of affairs will be carried by the husband and not by the wife.”
The judge indicated that, but for the husband’s conduct, he might have made another maintenance order, which would have met the wife’s income needs, and meant that the capital assets could have been divided between the parties.
However, that was simply not an option, in the light of the husband’s failure to pay the maintenance pending suit. In addition, the husband was now living out of the jurisdiction, which meant that enforcement of any maintenance order by the wife would be difficult, if not impossible.
The judge therefore decided to capitalise the maintenance, by awarding the wife 71% of the assets. In addition, the husband was ordered to pay £54,000 towards the wife’s legal costs, in view of his “egregious and dishonest” conduct of the case.