I’ll have to live on the streets, claims tycoon battling ex over £2m payout
A MINING tycoon who has been locked in a 17-year legal battle with his ex-wife has been left with just £5 in the bank and faces homelessness, a court heard yesterday.
David Mann, 50, had agreed to pay his ex-wife £24,000 a year plus child maintenance and school fees when they split in 1999 after being married for around a decade, a judge was told.
He has already paid his former wife Shelley nearly £ 1.5million, but she claimed he owed her around £2million in back-payments – and wanted him sentenced for contempt of court.
Yesterday Family Division judge Mrs Justice Roberts concluded that Mr Mann’s ex-wife was in fact owed almost £625,000, plus 17 years’ worth of interest.
But she accepted his insistence that he was effectively penniless, rejecting his former spouse’s claims that he was hiding a fortune behind an ‘elaborate facade’.
Mrs Mann had insisted her ex-husband part-owned a flat in Eaton Place – one of London’s most prestigious addresses – through an offshore trust. And the High Court in London was told he has been living in a £90,000-a-year rented flat in upmarket Kensington, West London.
However, Mr Mann – who specialised in brokering mining deals – told Mrs Justice Roberts he had last ‘cut a deal’ in the mining industry in 2013, faced having to leave his home, had under £5 left in his bank account and had even applied to the council for housing benefit.
He was now ‘reliant on charity’ of friends, family and fellow congregation members at his synagogue, he added. After reading a letter from Mr Mann’s rabbi, backing his claim to be dependent on handouts, Mrs Justice Roberts said she could find ‘no reliable evidence of hidden funds belonging to him’.
The couple had married in South Africa in 1988, but divorced when their two daughters were both in primary school – they are now aged 21 and 22. Yesterday Mrs Justice Roberts expressed sympathy for Mrs Mann, 48, who was given the family’s £1.8million home in Hampstead in the divorce – but had since seen her finances fall into disarray, and now faces evicton from a Belgravia home over £50,000 in rent arrears.
However she accepted Mr Mann didn’t have the means to pay up – pointing out that he had withdrawn his son by his subsequent partner from private school at a critical point in his education.
The judge decided that Mr Mann – who was declared bankrupt in 2004 – would not have gone to such a length simply to cheat his ex of her payout. She added: ‘I am not sure the hidden wealth to which his ex-wife points actually exists’.
She expressed doubt that Mr Mann had concealed a fortune for ‘more than twice the length of their marriage’. And she was ‘entirely satisfied’ that the Eaton Place flat was long gone, along with the other trappings of the couple’s once luxurious lifestyle.
Refusing to find Mr Mann in contempt of court, the judge said his ex-wife had failed to prove him a cheat.
‘I am unable to say that I am sure that he has had, or currently has, the means to pay the sums which I have found to be due to his ex-wife,’ she added.