Wife keeps most of her fortune in divorce due to ‘short marriage’
COUPLES who divorce after a brief marriage can no longer expect to have their assets split equally by default following an appeal court ruling.
Julie Sharp, 44, an energy trader, successfully challenged a ruling that her former husband was entitled to half of the fortune she built up during their four-year marriage.
She argued that “because this was a short marriage he should not get half of the matrimonial pot”.
The Court of Appeal ruled in her favour, concluding the £2.725 million payout to Robin Sharp, an IT consultant, should be reduced to £2million.
Leading divorce lawyers said the ruling marked a “sea change” in how one of the basic principles of matrimonial law could now be applied to shorter marriages.
Alex Carruthers, partner at Hughes Fowler Carruthers, said: “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.
“It was an area in which we had a pretty rigid rule. Now there is a caveat; in certain circumstances, we do not follow it. It creates a further issue for divorcing couples to bicker about, and for lawyers to profit from.”
The judges heard that the Sharps had a “four-year marriage to separation”, during which time they had no children and kept their finances separate.
The couple were both earning about £100,000 when they met in 2007 but during the relationship, Mrs Sharp also received bonuses of £10.5million. They separated in 2013 when Mrs Sharp learnt her husband had been “pursuing a new relationship”.
Two years later, a family judge ruled that the “principled outcome” was that Mr Sharp, 43, should receive half of their total assets as no sufficient reason had been identified for departing from the estab- lished principle of equal division. However, Lord Justice Mcfarlane, one of three judges sitting on the Court of Appeal panel, said there was “no impediment” to depart from that principle, concluding that in a short, dual-career marriage in which the couple had kept their finances separate, it was indeed “justified”.
The panel ruled yesterday that Mr Sharp’s award should be reduced to £2million, comprising a property valued at £1.1million, to be transferred to him, plus a lump sum of £900,000.
Lord Justice Mcfarlane said the case was “a ‘non-business partnership, nonfamily asset case’ where the bulk, indeed effectively all, of the property has been generated by the wife”. Jonathan Southgate QC, for Mr Sharp, argued that the introduction of litigation that took account of the length of a marriage and the type of assets when dividing matrimonial property was a “retrograde step” that would “lead to uncertainty in the law”.
Jo Edwards, partner at Forsters, said it posed “almost as many questions as it answers including: how long does a marriage have to be to be defined as ‘short’?”