Millionaire ex-wives’ club
Inside the world of the super divorcees
‘In my line of work I’ve seen everything,” says Davina Katz. “It’s eye-watering what human beings are capable of doing to each other.”
Raven-haired and immaculately turned out (her fondness is clothes by Stella Mccartney and Alexander Mcqueen), Katz, 37, is a divorce lawyer who, as she puts it, “rarely acts for clients with wealth below £50million”. They’ve included “two Oscar-winning actors [one was Kate Winslet when she split from her director husband Sam Mendes], a number of monarchs in European royal families, some of the most famous musicians in the world and a couple of politicians”.
Katz’s high-octane world is explored tomorrow night in Millionaires’
Ex-wives Club, a BBC documentary about the super-rich. Although overall UK divorce rates are slowly declining (mainly because more and more couples are cohabiting), business for lawyers like Katz, a partner and head of family law at central-london-based Schillings, remains in overdrive, with the British divorce industry estimated to be worth around £1 billion.
The reason for this is, first, the vast number of international super-rich who’ve chosen to make politically stable London their home; secondly, the many (usually) wives from all over the world who choose to divorce here, because of our 50:50 principle, which dictates that as a starting point all assets must be equally split.
“I’ve yet to meet a man who isn’t astonished he has to part with half of his wealth, it’s brutal,” says Katz in the quick-fire tones of someone who’s billing £500 an hour. “Breaking to a CEO that this is what can happen, after all those years of waking up at 5am, can be very challenging. But the English legal system is extremely paternalistic and looks after the needs of mothers and wives over and above everything. We are certainly not a cradle of gender equality.”
Grumbling from some judges that divorcees should find jobs instead of seeing maintenance as a “meal ticket for life” are – so far – doing little to deter discarded wives from filing cases. Last year, an unnamed Russian billionaire was ordered to pay his 44-year-old “housewife” former spouse £453million – thought to be the biggest award ever ordered by a British judge.
Rights and wrongs of each case notwithstanding, the question is why people who are already richer than most of our wildest dreams will go to such lengths to hold on to cash that they would never actually miss. Think of the ungallant example of Mick Jagger who, when splitting from Jerry Hall after cheating on her for more than two decades, argued that their Balinese wedding ceremony made their union invalid, substantially reducing her claim and also delegitimising their four children.
“When people are unscrambling a marriage they get very focused on what they are going to get from the wreckage. Everything tends to be seen through a financial prism, they tend to lose sight of what’s enough and attempt to find every pound coin down the back of the sofa,” says Diana Parker, partner at Withers Worldwide. She boasts, like Katz, the no-nonsense manner of someone used to breaking unpalatable truths, has an hourly rate of £600 and goes by the nickname The Ice Queen.
“Is an extra £5million on top of £50million going to make them happier? I don’t know,” Parker continues. “People who have a lot of money measure everything by money, including their self-esteem. Also, very few of them have this wealth in cash and can’t simply write out a cheque. To find the money for a settlement, they often have to dismantle their businesses and that is both difficult and demeaning.”
While some unscrupulous lawyers may encourage their clients to litigate endlessly, Katz and Parker both favour compromise and settling as quickly as possible.
“To husbands, I say you could fight for two years and save £X but think how much money you could make in that time, without all this draining distraction,” Parker says. “Some listen, some don’t. In 99 per cent of cases you achieve sensible outcomes through negotiation; it’s only the one per cent of cases that continue to litigation that you hear about.”
One of the most notorious cases is the 11-year saga of fixer-to-the rich Scot Young and his ex-wife Michelle. As a tired-and-drawn-looking Michelle, now living in a basement flat, explains in the BBC documentary, multi-millionaire Young refused to pay her and her two daughters the £26.6million she was awarded in 2013, claiming he was bankrupt.
She – convinced Young was hiding his assets – has clocked up 65 court hearings, 13 sets of lawyers costing £6 million, and £10 million on investigators and interest on the loans taken out to pay those fees. Three years ago, Young died falling from the roof of his £3million penthouse, with the coroner refusing
‘They attempt to find every pound coin down the back of the sofa’
to rule his death a suicide; Michelle is bankrupt and still obsessively searching for his money – adamant that those who helped him hide it eventually sanctioned his murder. “This isn’t over yet,” she swears.
“The law has incentivised men to hide, it’s also incentivised women to fight, it’s turned women into amateur sleuths,” Parker says. “It’s quite tricky when you think you have been abandoned not to try to want to compensate with the only compensation available to you, which is money. Rich or poor, for everyone, the underlying issue is the same – being valued. You get used to what you have got. You might think it’s not the end of the world to no longer be able to travel business class on a flight to Paris, but someone else would, because they are not being allowed to do what they feel entitled to do and they feel slighted.”
The documentary also features Parker’s former client Lisa Tchenguiz, scion of a super-rich Iraqi family, who, after her nine-year marriage ended, spent four years battling her ex-husband, Vivian Imerman, for a £100million share of his billions, but eventually settled for £15 million. “I just didn’t want to spend another second on a past life that wasn’t worth salvaging… it was toxic,” she says. “It was the best decision I ever took to move on with the rest of my life.”
“Lisa is a good example of how to handle a divorce. She’s very happy and bubbly, she loves engaging with life, she didn’t relish getting cramped into very hostile time-consuming proceedings. This is not a fun way of spending time,” says Parker.
Though both lawyers say almost no revelation shocks them, Katz was shaken at the beginning of the decade to discover a new trend for men to be supporting two families – one official and one in secret. “Thanks to social media, some individuals – usually not my clients – had created new identities, gone out of their way to be someone different and really run with it, created their own Facebook pages, then meeting people and starting separate families, usually living not very far away from the first family.
“What surprised me was it was usually people who were in very highpowered jobs, who seemed to have pulled it off – often for a very long time. But then eventually a text would be discovered or a hidden mobile phone and it would all kick off.”
While Katz understands why wives making such a discovery might want an immediate split, she’s also shocked – and saddened – by how many people demand divorces for the most trivial reasons. “A lot of people come to see me saying they’re bored; their marriages are not exciting any more; they’re expecting the giddiness of the early years to continue every day. Marriage is something we have to invest in, some days are easier than others and I think fame and wealth do make it harder for people to make sacrifices and compromise.”
“It’s easy to get a divorce and then find the grass isn’t necessarily greener,” agrees Parker. “Being single comes with other problems, revolving around loneliness, the pressures of feeling you have to be playing the field, of setting up new step-families.”
This awareness is one of the reasons Parker has remained married for 27 years. “Most of my colleagues have long and solid marriages, and this is not by accident,” she says. “One does tend to invest quite heavily in one’s own marriage because you know what it’s like if it doesn’t go well,” agrees Katz, who is also married, with a young family.
But there are rumblings of change:
many judges are pushing for alterations in legislation leading to a “no-fault” divorce, where couples can split simply by asking to do so rather than – as now – proving the marriage has “irretrievably broken down”. It’s a concept Katz dislikes. “I’m already shocked at the disposability of marriage, and if you do away with that burden of proof and replace it with simply submitting a tick online you are making it much easier to dissolve a marriage and putting even more pressure on a very overburdened legal system.”
Parker is more cautiously welcoming of the reforms, which – after all – will have little effect on her end of the business. “Once a marriage is over, people don’t really care about who is at fault and this won’t make it any easier to sort out the finances – divorce can be agony and this can’t take away the sting.”
Millionaires’ Ex-wives Club is on BBC Two, tomorrow night at 9pm
‘The law has incentivised women to fight, it’s turned them into amateur sleuths’