Infidelity penalty clause now tightens prenuptial deals

IT IS THE latest must-have for wealthy couples about to marry.

Growing numbers of brides and grooms drawing up a prenuptial agreement are insisting on an infidelity penalty clause, a top UK divorce lawyer revealed.

The clause means that if the pair break up because one of them is unfaithful, the adulterer will lose much of their share of the divorce settlement. Divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag said adultery clauses were “at the fore” of the development of prenup deals.

This made it harder for divorce courts to ignore pre-marriage contracts. A change to the law formalising the legal status of prenups is now being considered.

Meanwhile, couples using the new infidelity clauses in prenups are returning to the traditional idea that when a marriage fails someone is to blame and must pay.

The use of penalties for infidelity is likely to spread from celebrities and the wealthy to ordinary middle-class couples as more people seize the new legal opportunities. Prenups are likely to prove worthwhile to those who wish to protect suburban family homes and middle-income savings and pension pots from expensive divorce settlements imposed by the courts.

Judges do not take adultery into account when they divide a couple’s assets in a contested case – a practice which has persistently angered husbands ordered to pay a large share of their wealth to an unfaithful wife. – Daily Mail Greece, handcuffed to its Brussels warders, is a long way from being fully in charge of its own destiny.

What about the US? It has brought geopolitics into play by telling the Europeans via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that Greek debt was unsustainable and needed to be written down. It advocates for the same approach applied to German debt in the 1950s – or, more recently, Poland and Finland after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Trouble is, those debt reductions occurred outside the euro zone (that is, before there ever was one). Germany, of course, breached euro zone rules when it wanted to in 2004 and the UK had no problems finding 10 billion to bail out Ireland in 2010. Thus, the idea that the EU cannot bend its rules is wrong. No other euro zone country benefits from the Greek disaster. If Grexit happens, any weaker euro zone economy will be next in line and Brexit in Britain will become inevitable.

Greek debt forgiveness is now on the horizon in the shape of pushing back repayment dates, but only if Tsipras gets reforms through parliament.

There is as yet no President Barack Obama doctrine echoing the 1947 Truman doctrine when the US asserted its duty to save Greece for the Euro Atlantic community. Then as now, Greece remains the weakest link on the southern flank in the Nato-EU alliance. The troubling question is this: Was giving special dispensation to Greece back in the late 1940s a crucial reason behind the country never finding its own proper internal balance?

Washington turned a blind eye to the colonels’ coup in 1967 and Europe turned a blind eye to the corrupt clientelist economic policy that was sustained in Greece by both the socialists in Pasok and the conservatives in New Democracy since Greece entered the European Community in 1981.

Greece thus has never really embraced the opportunities and responsibilities that are involved in any market economy.