Money can’t buy happiness, judge tells £1m divorce pair
A WEALTHY couple who have spent £1million fighting over custody of their children were told by a judge yesterday that they had forgotten the old adage: “Money can’t buy you happiness.”
Lord Justice Peter Jackson warned the parents that their future was “bleak” if they cannot be more “considerate” to each other, after a bitter split more than a decade ago that left them living in separate countries.
The judge told the High Court in London that the couple, who are Russian and cannot be identified, had “every conceivable material advantage”, but money had not brought happiness.
The husband had made a fortune in the oil business and retired in his early 40s. While their two teenage sons had all the trappings of a fabulously rich lifestyle, the family had “forgotten how to do the simple things”, he said. The “pursuit and accumulation of wealth” had created conditions which left everyone “thoroughly miserable,” he added.
The judge outlined his thoughts in a ruling published after a private hearing in the Family Division.
He said: “In a case of this kind, where a family has every conceivable material advantage, it is easy to forget the old truth that money cannot buy you happiness. It certainly has not done for this family. The pursuit and accumulation of wealth has created conditions that have left everyone spoilt for choice and thoroughly miserable. If the parents and children cannot return to a more considerate, more normal way of behaving, the future is bleak.”
He added: “The children have grown used to the usual trappings of an opulent lifestyle: lavish homes, privileged schools, incessant international travel, being constantly surrounded by staff.
“For the sons, this is their norm, but instead of providing them with opportunities, it has only given them problems.
“I do not think that the boys – and perhaps the parents either – realise that this is a lifestyle lived only by a tiny minority of people. In dealing with all this material ‘success’, the family has forgotten how to do the simple things.”
The judge concluded that the sons who were living with their mother in England should move to Switzerland to live with their father.