Severely injured soldier in divorce battle over £1.1m compensation
ONE of the most seriously injured soldiers of the Afghanistan war goes to court today in a divorce battle that risks leaving him with only a fraction of his £1.1 million compensation.
Simon Vaughan was left severely brain damaged and unable to walk or speak properly after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Helmand province in 2008.
He and his wife, Donna, split up in February 2013 and she is entitled to make a claim on his compensation to help her bring up their two children.
However, much of the money is understood to have been spent.
A family court judge, sitting in Telford, will decide how much money Mrs Vaughan should have.
The court could order Corporal Vaughan, who was serving with 29 Commando regiment, to sell the bungalow that was specially adapted for him. Land Registry documents show the property in Shropshire was bought outright for £295,000 in 2009. But when construction work began to adapt it, builders discovered that the house was structurally unsafe. At a cost of several hundred thousand pounds, the bungalow had to be demolished and rebuilt, draining his finances. There is now understood to be only £200,000 left. With money running low, Cpl Vaughan, 31, had been faced with conducting the case on his own, even though he can largely only communicate with the aid of a computer.
However, Julian Ribet, a partner with Levison Meltzer Pigott, said his legal firm had taken on the case free of charge. “Simon’s case raises a number of issues over the treatment of injury compensation and it challenges current family law thinking in relation to the interpretation of financial ‘needs’ on divorce,” he said.
Cpl Vaughan has said: “I am anxious about my future. I have to watch everything I spend because I don’t know how much I have.”
He was so badly injured in the Taliban attack in Musa Qala – he also suffered a shattered pelvis, broken back, jaw, femur and collapsed lungs – that Army doctors, convinced he would not survive the flight home, had pinned his obituary to his bag.
His family was warned that he could spend the rest of his life in a “vegetative state”. Then one day he achieved the “impossible” and sent his son a text message saying: “Night Ben, daddy loves you lots.” Mrs Vaughan said at the time: “I rang the hospital to ask what was going on and they said Simon had sent it. I collapsed in tears.”
Her lawyers declined to comment ahead of the court case.