Millionaire is paying just £7 a WEEK child support

Judge’s fury at father with £5.2m in property and pension pot

A HIGH Court judge has called for an urgent change to the way child support is calculated after a multi-millionaire was allowed to pay a ‘pitiful’ £7 a week in maintenance for his son.

The father has assets of more than £5million but is accused of using a ‘clever accountant’ to hide his riches.

The 65-year-old has been able to get away with paying a ‘mere pittance’, Justice Nicholas Mostyn said, due to changes in child support rules made five years ago that meant assets that did not earn money were not considered in assessments of ability to pay.

The judge, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court in London, made his comments in a ruling on the latest round of a money dispute between the separated parents of the unnamed

‘Little short of scandalous’

teenager. The couple, who were never married, have a 16-year-old son.

Justice Mostyn said the father – who has six properties and a pension fund worth a total of £5.2million – was only required to pay the ‘pitiful minimum sum of £7 a week’ because his sole source of income was a state pension. Since January this year, when the father turned 65, he has paid only £111.28 to support his son.

Justice Mostyn said the case was an ‘indictment’ of the child support system. Previously, a parent’s assets could be used to calculate how much they should pay in child support.

But in 2012, the system was changed amid fears parents were being penalised because they had assets that did not make them any money. Now child support payments are calculated only on a parents’ taxable income. The wealthy Londoner would have paid more than £40,000 in support had his assets been taken into account.

Justice Mostyn said the evidence given by the estranged father – who cannot be named for legal reasons – had been ‘highly evasive’, and said he had used ‘all-too-familiar manoeuvres’ to try to ‘ insulate’ his resources from his son’s mother and the court. He said the father had ‘very substantial’ assets and his ‘parsimonious approach to the support of his son is little short of scandalous’.

While the boy’s mother earns £500 a month working part-time, the court heard his father spends most of his time with his parents, who pay for his day-to-day living costs in exchange for him taking care of them.

Justice Mostyn said the Government ‘urgently’ needed to con- sider reinstating old rules to take into account a parent’s assets.

David Burrowes, the mother’s former Tory MP for Enfield Southgate, raised the matter in Parliament – proposing a Bill to ensure parents could not hide wealth in assets to dodge payments. He said the boy should not be made to pay the price of low child maintenance contributions – ‘simply because his father has a clever accountant who can help to hide his assets’.