Date of Case: 10 February 2021
Case Reference: [2021] EWFC 14

Lewis Marks QC led Katie Cowton QC for the husband on the wife’s financial remedy application. Highly complex facts with offshore trust structure from which the parties had benefitted. Both parties brought assets into the 33-year marriage, but the husband’s had been incorporated into the matrimonial property while the wife’s had been ‘buried in the ground’ and not deployed. H’s management and investment of W’s inherited assets was held not to have ‘matrimonialised’ them, whereas H’s deployment of his own inherited assets for the benefit of the family was treated as ‘matrimonialising’ his assets.

By trial, the wealth available for distribution was somewhere between £50 million (husband’s case) and £60 million (wife’s case). There was an additional sum of approximately US$50 million held in an offshore trust, of which the children were the principal beneficiaries and which was initially included in the wife’s claim. However, she later accepted that those funds were no longer “resources” to which the husband had access and they were therefore excluded from the dispositive powers of the court.

Bailli report: https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2021/14.html&query=(title:(+WX+))+AND+(title:(+v+))+AND+(title:(+HX+))+AND+(title:(+(Treatment+))+AND+(title:(+of+))+AND+(title:(+Matrimonial+))+AND+(title:(+Non-Matrimonial+))+AND+(title:(+Property)+))+AND+(title:(+.2021.+))+AND+(title:(+EWFC+))+AND+(title:(+14+))

Judgment in Family Law Week: https://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed219345