Ex-wife who blew £230k payout can’t have more
‘The wife will have to adjust’
A WIFE who squandered her divorce settlement yesterday lost her campaign to squeeze her former husband for more.
Supreme Court judges said there was no reason why beautician Maria Mills should get a second bite 16 years after her divorce from Graham Mills.
The five judges ruled that surveyor Mr Mills, 52, should not have to pay his wife twice over as a result of her ‘unwise’ financial decisions, which meant she had lost all the money he gave her.
The ruling put a fresh question mark over the idea that a divorced wife should get a meal ticket for life from her husband – a concept that led to divorcees in the mid-2000s collecting millions after shortlived marriages.
It signalled that in future judges are likely to rule that a former wife is expected to make her own living. Mr and Mrs Mills, who were married in 1987 and have an adult son, parted in 2000.
In their divorce in 2002, Mrs Mills, also 52, was given £230,000, the lion’s share of the value of their home in Guildford, Surrey. She also won a maintenance order under which her husband was to pay her £13,200 a year for life.
However instead of using the money to buy a new home outright, Mrs Mills said she had to live in a more expensive area for the sake of her son, and, even though she worked part-time, took out a £125,000 mortgage on a £345,000 home in up-market Weybridge, Surrey.
Over the years, she bought and sold a series of other properties and debts grew. By 2009 she was living in a rented home and had a bank overdraft of £4,000, credit card debts of £18,000 and an unpaid tax bill of £20,000.
She went back to court to try to persuade a judge that her husband’s maintenance order was raised so she could afford to pay her rent. But the judge rejected her plea and said: ‘The wife will have to adjust her expenditure to live within her means.’
The case went to the Appeal Court last year, where judges took Mrs Mills’s side.
Appeal judges said the wife should not have to live below the level of her basic needs, and ordered that Mr Mills’s payments should be raised to £17,292 a year.
Mr Mills, now remarried and earning £55,000 a year from his surveying company, took his case to the Supreme Court, where yesterday justices said he should not be forced to pay all of his former wife’s rent, and that his maintenance payments should remain at £13,200.
Lord Wilson, giving judgement, said that ‘a court would need to give very good reasons for requiring a spouse to fund the payment of the other spouse’s rent in the circumstances.
‘A spouse may well have an obligation to make provision for the other,’ Lord Wilson said, ‘but an obligation to duplicate it in such circumstances is most improbable.’
Mrs Mills’ lawyer Joanne Wescott, of Osbornes Law, said: ‘Maria Mills is disappointed and feeling bruised.’
She said the case would not mean an end to the duty of husbands to support divorced wives.
‘The Supreme Court were asked to determine a very narrow point about whether the court was entitled to increase spousal maintenance payments to meet rent when provision for the wife’s housing needs had already been met in the original order,’ Miss Wescott said.
‘The decision does not bring about the end of spousal maintenance for the wife, unattractively described as a meal ticket for life, far from it. The original spousal maintenance provision of £1,100 per month from 2002 remains intact.’