What Britain’s MOST EXPENSIVE DIVORCE LAWYER can teach you about surviving a break-up
EMERGING into the sunlight from the high Court in Central London, dressed in an elegant green silk jacket, Britain’s top divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag might have been forgiven for a surreptitious fist pump.
She and her team had just won a landmark case to protect the £100million fortune of german heiress Katrin radmacher from the clutches of her client’s ex-husband, French banker and academic Nicolas granatino.
At the same time, they’d overturned centuries of legal history, and paved the way for a radical change in British divorce law.
No wonder Ayesha was smiling broadly. Flamboyant, outspoken and a regular on breakfast TV sofas, she is well used to turning heads.
Almost certainly the most expensive divorce lawyer in the UK, she has a clientele of international aristocrats, footballers and business tycoons who pay £795 an hour — ten times what the Prime Minister earns — for her particular combination of empathy and ruthlessness.
‘i’m always conscious of trying to strike a deal that’s fair and acceptable to everyone,’ she says. And then, with a touch of steel, adds: ‘But sometimes when that’s just not happening, you have to fight to win.’
if radmacher vs granatino is still the most important case she’s ever won, it also illustrates perfectly one of the most valuable pieces of advice she gives to clients now.
Dating from 2010, the judgment upheld for the first time in a British court the principle of a binding pre-nuptial agreement, making it theoretically possible to legally enforce a fairly contracted prenup here in the UK. granatino had argued that the prenup he’d signed was unfair; the judges disagreed.
As a result, says Ayesha, drawing up a prenuptial agreement should be on everyone’s wedding to-do list, just like ordering flowers or deciding on the dress. Never mind gazing into your groom’s eyes — scrutinise his bank balance instead.
‘it’s just naïve not to,’ says Ayesha, who’s been married twice. ‘it’s like thinking you don’t need fire insurance because your house won’t ever burn down. Making a pre-nup should be as routine as making a will, and for most people it should cost about the same. it’s a bit boring and it’s a bit awkward, but it’s also very sensible.
‘More than 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce in this country, not because people are nastier to each other than they used to be, but because they’re living longer and life is pulling them in different directions.
‘i do feel that if you can’t agree on a mutual perspective on your finances at the start of your marriage, then actually it’s not going to work on a deep level.’
With homes in Dubai, London and italy, and an eponymous law firm which has an annual turnover of £10-£15 million, it goes without saying that Ayesha and her second husband, Stephen Bence — who works as a director of strategy at Vardags — drew up a pre-nup themselves when they married in 2014, bashing out the details over the course of ‘one of the most stressful weeks of our lives’.
Yet she also claims signing it was a moment of deep seriousness that paradoxically reinforced their love for each other.
Within London’s stuffier legal corridors, 49-year-old Ayesha divides opinion. Openly critical of other divorce lawyers (‘i did find when i first started that other lawyers were very much about ego and could be bitchy towards each other,’ she tells me) she also raises hackles with her love of expensive bling — her £20,000 diamond and peridot engagement ring became briefly famous within law circles.
But Ayesha gets results, and in the cut-throat world of multimillionaire divorce — and occasionally even billionaire divorce — little else counts.
her law firm now has five offices across the country and employs 75 staff, many of them mothers on flexible hours with paid-for nursery care — a deliberate legacy of the constant niggling guilt she felt herself when founding the company 12 years ago, painfully divorced and a single mother to three children, one of whom was still a baby.
today, Jasper is 21, Felix 20 and helena 12. ‘i set up my own firm so that no one could mess with me,’ she says, and laughs — but also recounts tales of the distinctly unfunny sexism she encountered in City law firms early in her career.
‘i can’t tell you how gloriously liberating it’s been to be free of all that,’ she says.
her pioneering work won Ayesha ‘Woman of the Year’ at the NatWest Everywoman Awards in 2015. the Awards include the Aphrodite award for mumpreneurs, given to women who have started businesses when their children were 12 or under, which is sponsored by the Daily Mail.
this year Ayesha has been busier than ever. the past few months have thrown up some headlinegrabbing rulings in the divorce courts. Last month, after a fouryear legal fight, she won a colossal £64 million pay-out for client Pauline Chai, a former Malaysian beauty queen and 70-year-old wife of Laura Ashley boss Khoo Kay Peng, 78.
the case was widely reported as striking a blow for stay-at-home mothers, since Chai had devoted herself throughout the 42 year marriage to a traditional role as homemaker and mother to the couple’s five children. As the case dragged on, Ayesha and her team successfully rejected Khoo’s attempts to
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extricate himself from the marriage for a fraction of the money eventually won, while legal fees spiralled. In the end, the costs alone topped a reported £6 million.
It was a case that also cemented London’s reputation as the divorce capital of the world, where ex-wives in particular are likely to win much more generous settlements than they might elsewhere.
‘We have a very fair system here that really recognises non-monetary contribution to a marriage — the looking after children and so on — and is strong on financial re-distribution,’ says Ayesha.
So has the pendulum swung too far here?
‘There was an argument for a while that, yes, it had, and in the old days there was a sense that a maintenance order was a meal ticket for life,’ replies Ayesha.
‘I do think certain judgments encouraged the financially ruthless spouse to think: “OK, instead of rebuilding my own independence, I’ll just hang out and go shopping.” But that’s starting to change. While settlements such as Pauline Chai’s are about splitting the capital assets in a marriage, regular maintenance orders are now less likely to be as bountiful.
‘When it’s given nowadays, maintenance is more about allowing someone to adjust to their new life and re-establish themselves than it is allowing them to lunch and play tennis.’
Meanwhile, Ayesha cautions women to prepare themselves for divorce to get nastier. In March this year, what many regard as a major flaw at the heart of British divorce law was thrown into sharp relief by the case of Tini Owens, a 66-year-old woman from Worcestershire who was denied a divorce by senior judges amid claims she is ‘trapped’ in a loveless marriage.
Current grounds for divorce include irretrievable breakdown, five years of separation, adultery, desertion or unreasonable behaviour, but when Mr Owens contested his wife’s evidence of his own ‘unreasonable behaviour’ and opposed her application, judges sided with him.
The highly unusual ruling effectively left Mrs Owens in limbo and as a result, says Ayesha, lawyers will now advise clients to make more aggressive and lurid allegations against spouses to get the mud to stick, increasing the ‘toxicity’ of divorce proceedings in general. Ayesha is now leading a campaign to enshrine ‘no-fault divorce’ in British law.
‘Current divorce law in this respect is really poisonous,’ she says. ‘It puts us in the horrible position of having to make unpleasant allegations against our spouses because otherwise you run the risk of your divorce not going through. It’s hard to start the process of separation from someone you’ve loved, with whom you might have children, by throwing insults.’
AYESHA is calling on political parties to ‘bite the bullet’ and pledge to change the law. At heart, however, there’s even more at stake here — the very notion of marriage as a union for life when we’re all living a lot longer and could easily be married for at least 60 years. Are we really expected to stay in love with one person for that long?
‘I see a lot of people suffering a great deal of emotional pain and distress because they’re beating themselves up about the fact that their marriage has failed, when actually life just goes in different phases,’ says Ayesha.
‘I got married again a few years ago, and my husband and I are at a stage in our lives that I hope we’d be able to go the distance, but had we got together earlier, I think the chances of that would have been slim. We all evolve through so many life changes. I have, and the men I’ve been involved with have, too, and sometimes you get lucky and grow together but other times you grow apart.’
Of course you might expect a divorce lawyer to advocate, well, divorce but if we all have pre-nups, as she insists we should, we won’t need lawyers anyway.
The real motive behind the campaign for no-fault divorce, she says, is to save children the horrors of a deliberately bitter split.
Cruelly let down by her own father, Ayesha knows how devastating it is to experience parental desertion. Growing up in Oxford, she saw her dad once a year if she was lucky, when he turned up on a visit from Pakistan where, Ayesha was told, he was doing important political work as a senator.
She later discovered, he had another family — a wife and two daughters. Her mother, young and pretty, originally from Northumbria, worked in administration at Oxford University, but there was never much money.
‘My mother was dedicated to my education and the idea that I had potential, but I suppose what also pushed me to try to achieve excellence was this idea that I’d been abandoned; this rejection complex, and a sense that I had to be really amazing in order to sort of validate myself,’ she says, slowly.
‘I grew up in a small family riven with divorces and I’ve always been motivated by the idea of protecting children from the acrimony and bitterness that can go on.’
SHE’D like to see the introduction of an anti-fecklessness law, where divorced dads are legally obliged to see their children for a certain number of weeks a year, unless there are good reasons for them not to, with sanctions including fines for those who don’t.
‘There has to be a sense of real responsibility towards the children,’ she says. ‘You can’t have someone just not turning up for contact because they can’t be bothered, or because their new partner doesn’t like it. I think there should be orders to spend a certain amount of time with a child provided it’s in the child’s interests.’
In the end, however, Ayesha’s central lesson is a little counterintuitive. ‘It’s easy to get divorced,’ she says simply. ‘If both parties agree to it, you can even buy the forms and do it yourself. But what’s hard is fairness. It’s much harder to get a good settlement if you haven’t got some strength behind you, like a damned good lawyer or a solid pre-nup.
‘The danger is that we get too emotional. You’re tormented by jealousy and loss and the fear of being alone for ever, and if you’re not careful you crumble and make terrible decisions. I’ve seen it happen. That’s when you need someone in your corner.’
Which is where the divorce lawyer comes in, of course. And I’d not bet on anyone being tougher in a fight than Ayesha.