Couples who divorce after brief marriage may no longer have assets split 50/50
COUPLES who divorce after a short marriage may no longer have their assets split equally, judges ruled yesterday.
Julie Sharp successfully challenged a settlement that gave her cheating husband Robin half her £5.45million fortune after their four-year marriage ended.
She argued her ex’s payout was ‘unfair’ in light of her overwhelming contribution to their finances.
Judges at London’s Appeal Court have now slashed his settlement from £2.7million to £2million after hearing how the couple, who have no children, kept their money separate.
Lord Justice McFarlane said the case ‘triggered a plain exception’ to the 50-50 sharing principle.
He concluded: ‘Short marriage, no children, dual incomes and separate finances are sufficient to justify a departure from the equal sharing principle in order to achieve fairness between these parties.’
Legal experts described the ruling as groundbreaking and said it marked a ‘sea change’ from the convention that marital assets are halved in divorce. When she married in June 2009, Mrs Sharp earned £135,000-a year as a trader in the coal industry and also collected bonuses of more than £1million a year.
As the energy market soared and her pay spiralled, the 44- year- old bought two houses in Gloucestershire and treated her husband to a ‘boy’s toy’ Aston Martin.
But despite her sudden wealth Mrs Sharp was adamant that her 43-year- old spouse ‘ didn’t see her as a sort of cash machine’.
He earned £90,000 as an IT consultant before he quit in 2012 to renovate their £2million six-bedroom house in Shurdington, near Chelten- ham. By February 2013, he had started a ‘clandestine affair’ which his wife discovered in September that year and petitioned for divorce soon afterwards, the court heard.
A High Court judge in 2015 initially awarded Mr Sharp £2,725,000 – exactly half of the £ 5.45million matrimonial assets. Divorce Court judge Sir Peter Singer said at the
‘Another thing to bicker about’
‘ Short marriage, no children, dual incomes and separate finances are sufficient to justify a departure from the equal ’ sharing principle
Lord Justice McFarlane yesterday
time: ‘No sufficient reason has been identified in this case for departing from equality of division’.
But Mrs Sharp appealed, insisting her ex-husband’s payout was ‘unprincipled’. Frank Feehan QC, for Mrs Sharp, said there had been no real ‘intermingling’ of the couple’s finances with each ‘earning and spending their own money’. They took turns to pick up the bill when dining out and Mr Sharp himself accepted his wife’s bonuses ‘were not his’, he argued.
‘Because this was a short marriage he should not get half of the matrimonial pot,’ the QC said.
Jonathan Southgate, for Mr Sharp, said their financial arrangements were typical of ‘traditional’ marriages where the bread- winner retains earnings and ‘ pays housekeeping to the other spouse’.
However, Lord Justice McFarlane said her huge bonuses were ‘ not family assets’, adding: ‘ The bulk, indeed effectively all, of the property has been generated by the wife’.
They both worked full time for most of the marriage and – except in the final year after Mr Sharp left his job – it was not claimed that he had made a greater ‘domestic contribution’ than his wife.
The judge added the judgment is not intended ‘ to unsettle the approach that is to be taken in the vast majority of cases’.
Divorce lawyer Alex Carruthers, partner at Hughes Fowler Carruthers, said: ‘This groundbreaking ruling ultimately dictates that marriage is no longer a financial partnership in some circumstances.
‘There was previously no legal distinction between a ‘short’ and a ‘long’ marriage, and therefore no defined point after which wealth generated should be shared.
‘The only clarity provided by this judgment is that there is now a further issue for divorcing couples to bicker about, and for lawyers to profit from.’ Andrew Newbury, of Hall Brown Family Law, said: ‘The Court of Appeal’s ruling is something of a sea change in how that concept of fairness should best be applied in relation to short marriages in particular.’