Names of record divorce couple to remain secret

Safety fears may have prompted order to grant anonymity to City trader and ex-wife in £453m case

A COUPLE involved in Britain’s biggest divorce award will not be identified after a judge ordered that their names should never be made public.

The husband in the case, a City trader, has been told to hand over £453million to his estranged wife, the mother of his two children.

But Mr Justice Haddon-cave yesterday issued an order preventing the couple’s identification. It is thought the wife may have requested anonymity over fears for her safety in a case involving such huge sums.

Legal sources say the judge’s concerns for her security may have overridden the principle of open justice.

The 44-year-old woman had argued she was due nearly a half share of the couple’s total £1billion fortune because of her “equal contributions to the welfare of the family”.

The judge rejected claims by the husband, a 61-year-old who had showered his wife with jewellery, credit cards and a private plane, that he was rich before the marriage and that he had made a “special contribution” to the creation of wealth.

Instead Mr Justice Haddon-cave awarded the woman at the centre of the case 41.5 per cent of the “total marital assets”. The award came after the husband, originally from the Caucasus, made a “sudden decision” two weeks before a scheduled trial “no longer to contest proceedings”.

He is thought to have returned to Russia and there are now questions as to whether his estranged wife will ever receive the money awarded to her,

The woman, who had been a “housewife and mother” throughout the marriage and still lives at the family home in Surrey, was not in court.

In his ruling yesterday Mr Justice Haddon-cave said the pair had met in 1989 while she was studying in Moscow.

The pair, who have two sons now aged 24 and 21, moved to London in 1993 and lived together in Surrey, where she brought up the children.

In 2013 the “very generous” husband bought his sons flats costing £29million and £7.2million. He also bought his wife jewellery worth more than £300,000, giving her unrestricted use of two credit cards and the use of a yacht, plane and helicopter.

Mr Justice Haddon-cave ruled that the man had not made a “special or stellar” contribution to the generation of marital assets. The award is thought to be the biggest by a UK divorce court.

Julian Ribet, a partner at leading specialist family firm Levison Meltzer Pigott, said: “This decision is another nail in the coffin of the ‘special contribution’ argument so often put forward by very wealthy husbands in long marriages who are desperately seeking to limit the amount that they have to pay over to their wives when they divorce.”