A guide to prenup agreements

A prenup agreement is a formal, written agreement between two partners prior to their marriage. It sets out ownership of all their belongings including money, assets and property and explains how it will be divided in the event of the breakdown of their marriage.

Considered by many as unromantic, practical by others at Stowe we like to think of them as a type of insurance policy.

Read why in the guide below (and they are not just for the wealthy).

Considered by many as unromantic, practical by others at Stowe we like to think of them as a type of insurance policy.

Read why in the guide below (and they are not just for the wealthy).

 

 

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Author: Stowe Family Law

What should I do if my husband/wife is having an affair?

Finding out that your spouse is having an affair can be devastating and place a severe strain on a relationship. Sometimes it spells the end of the marriage. Other times, couples repair the relationship, often making it stronger.

There is no right or wrong answer here. However, if you are married, there are some legal considerations for you if you partner has an affair. So, we asked Gabby Read-Thomas from our Altrincham office to take us through what you need to do if you find out your spouse has / is having an affair.

“Shocked, betrayed and confused are just some of the emotions that I see my clients dealing with when their relationship has broken down due to an affair.

In the beginning, I advise them to allow themselves some time to consider next steps rather than lashing out in an act of retaliation which they may later regret.

Once the initial dust has settled, communication is crucial, whether you want to try and save the relationship or have decided it is over and need to plan a way forward.

Staying together

Relationship counselling can be extremely helpful in supporting couples to open-up, explore the problems between them and get back on track.

There are many counselling services available, such as Relate, and a simple Google search should help you locate someone in your area or try the National Counselling Society, find a counsellor directory.

Separating

If there is no way back following an affair, then I would recommend taking early advice on the divorce process.

In English law there is only one ground to petition for divorce and that is that the marriage has irretrievably broken down. Although there has been a lot in the news about the new era of ‘no fault divorce’, it is likely to take some time for parliament to ratify the necessary legislation.  So for now, to prove this, you must currently rely on one of 5 facts and one of these is adultery.

Specifically, the law states that you can petition for a divorce based on adultery if your spouse has committed adultery and you find it intolerable to live with them.  Importantly however, same-sex spouses cannot use this fact to prove irretrievable breakdown (and would instead need to allege ‘unreasonable behaviour’).  Importantly, adultery can be committed and used for a reason to divorce, even after a married couple have separated.

Even if adultery is applicable, it isn’t necessarily that straight forward. What the court recognise as adultery and what you consider to be an affair are not always the same thing.

The law relating to adultery

The court considers adultery to be the voluntary sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. A close relationship which you may consider inappropriate, involving dates, messages, emails (but without actually having sex with that person) is not recognised legally as adultery.

However, whilst the court would not recognise it as adultery, such behaviour can be used as an example of unreasonable behaviour and a divorce petition can be presented on this basis instead, as it can with same-sex spouses who discover their spouse is conducting a relationship with a third party

It should also be pointed out that if you continue to live with your spouse for a period of 6 months or more after you found out about the adultery then you cannot use that adultery as the basis for a divorce petition, unless that adultery is continuing  If so,  the 6 month period begins to run from the last adulterous incident. If however it was a ‘one-off’ which took place more than 6 months before you found out, or your spouse denies having committed adultery, your safer option is to proceed on the basis of their behaviour.

Getting divorced

Citing adultery in a divorce petition requires the spouse to admit to the adultery in the paperwork. From a practical point of view, it is worthwhile asking their spouse  to sign a  statement confirming their agreement before proceedings are issued. In the long-run this will help reduce the risk of costly defended divorce proceedings. Again, if your spouse is unwilling to sign a statement, you should consider presenting your petition on the basis of unreasonable behaviour.

If you continue with the adultery petition and the divorce is defended it is the court that will decide whether there is evidence to show that the adultery has been committed, and let’s face it, short of hiring a private investigator (which can be done) it  is unlikely that you will have any direct evidence of the adultery.  However, if there is enough circumstantial evidence to show opportunity and an inclination to commit adultery, the court should be able to draw inferences that the adultery has been proved and the petition can proceed on that basis.

If you have concerns your spouse is having an affair and would like some initial legal advice, please contact our Client Care Team here or at the number below. All enquiries are strictly confidential.

 

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Author: Gabrielle Read Thomas

Husband not bound by terms of pre-nuptial agreement

In 2010 the Supreme Court held that, whilst pre-nuptial agreements are not binding in this country, the court should usually give effect to them, unless their terms are unfair. The effect of that ruling has been that many pre-nuptial agreements have since been upheld by our courts, and this has been reflected in the reported cases. However, the recent case Ipekçi v McConnell was an example of the court giving no weight to an agreement.

A look at this case must begin with the background of the parties.

The wife is the great-granddaughter of the founder of the Avon Products business empire. As Mr Justice Mostyn, who heard the case, explained, the vast amount of money generated by the business for the family means that, along with other relatives, the wife is the beneficiary of trusts in the USA with an overall value of at least $65 million. Now, as one might imagine, the trusts, and therefore the wife’s finances, were rather complicated. For the purpose of this post I will not go into those complications. Suffice to say that the wife is, by most measurements, comfortably well off.

The husband, in contrast, is the head concierge of the London Hilton Metropole hotel, earning about £35,000 gross. He has no net capital.

The parties met in New York in 2003, at which time the husband had no money beyond his earnings. The wife lived in London. They began cohabitation in January 2005. They agreed to marry, and a pre-nuptial agreement was suggested, and drafted by the wife’s lawyer. A lawyer was found to give the husband independent legal advice. Rather worryingly, this lawyer happened to be the solicitor who acted for the wife in her divorce from her first husband. The husband met the lawyer for the first time on the 3rd of November 2005, just three weeks before the marriage, which had been fixed to take place on the 26th of November.

The terms of the agreement were also slightly complicated. Again, I will not go into the details, but the effect of the agreement was that the husband would, in the circumstances that subsequently arose, not receive anything on divorce. Needless to say, the husband was advised that the agreement was slanted heavily in favour of the wife. Despite this, he signed it on the 11th of November.

The marriage eventually broke down, and the parties separated in November 2016. Divorce proceedings ensued, and the husband issued a financial remedies application. The application was heard by Mr Justice Mostyn in the High Court.

Mr Justice Mostyn had to decide, as a preliminary issue, what weight, if any, should be given to the pre-nuptial agreement. He had “no hesitation” in deciding that it would be wholly unfair to hold the husband to the agreement. His reasons for this included the following:

  1. The agreement specifically stated that it would be governed by New York law. However, there was a defect with the agreement under New York law, which meant that would carry little or no weight there.
  2. The husband could not be said to have had a full appreciation of the implications of the agreement, having had no legal advice at all about the impact of New York law. Further, Mr Justice Mostyn was unsurprisingly not satisfied that the solicitor who gave the advice was not compromised, by virtue of having acted previously for the wife in her first divorce. It was, he said, a clear situation of apparent bias.
  3. The agreement did not meet any needs of the husband.

Mr Justice Mostyn then went on to decide what the husband was entitled to. He awarded him a lump sum of £1,333,500, of which £375,000 was subject to a charge-back to the wife (or her estate), on the death of the husband.

The case is a reminder of just what the Supreme Court said in 2010: that the courts in this country are not bound by pre-nuptial agreements, and that if it is to be upheld any agreement must be freely entered into by each party, with a full appreciation of its implications, and be fair. And one of the elements of that fairness is that is that the agreement must address the needs of the parties.

You can read the full judgment here.

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Author: John Bolch

Sir James Munby finds that irregularity in divorce did not make it invalid

“Rules are rules, and must be obeyed”. Or so we are often told. However, even that rule has exceptions, as the remarkable case M v P demonstrates.

The rule in question is quite simple: that if you wish to divorce on the basis that you and the other party have been separated for a particular period (i.e. use that basis to prove the ground for divorce: that the marriage has irretrievably broken down), then that period must have been completed before the divorce petition is presented to the court. Thus if, as in this case, the petitioner wishes to divorce  on the basis that he and the respondent have been separated for at least two years and the respondent consents to the divorce, that two year period must have been completed before the petitioner presents his petition. (It should be noted in passing that it will not be necessary to prove irretrievable breakdown under the proposed no-fault divorce system, so the particular problem in this case will no longer arise if we get no-fault divorce.)

And what if the separation period has not been completed? Well, prior to this case I’m sure any family lawyer would have said that the petitioner has not proved that the marriage has broken down irretrievably, and cannot therefore have his divorce. But it seems that things are not quite that straightforward…

The facts in M v P were somewhat unusual. The parties were married on the 19th of September 2011. It appears that they never lived together (the husband claimed that the wife refused to share the same household as him). The husband, who was not legally represented, presented a divorce petition on the 14th of June 2013, on the basis that he and the wife had been separated for at least two years, and the wife consented to the divorce. The wife confirmed in her acknowledgement of the divorce petition that she consented to the divorce. The divorce proceeded, and a decree nisi was pronounced on the 21st of November 2013, and made absolute on the 24th of February 2014. Both the husband and the wife subsequently remarried.

I’m sure at this point that the reader will have spotted the problem in this case. If the parties were married on the 19th of September 2011 then they could not have been separated for two years by the time the petition was presented on the 14th of June 2013. The problem finally came to the attention of the court staff in October 2016. The matter went before a district judge, who allowed the husband to amend his petition to rely upon the wife’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’, and directed that the decree absolute remained valid.

The matter was then referred to the Queen’s Proctor. The Queen’s Proctor is an officer of the judiciary, who may intervene in divorce proceedings “to argue before the court any question in relation to the matter which the court considers it necessary or expedient to have fully argued”. The Queen’s Proctor did intervene here, applying to have the decree nisi set aside as it was a ‘nullity’, because the requisite period of separation had not expired before the divorce petition was presented, and the district judge had not had the power to cure the defect by allowing the petition to be amended. Obviously, if the application succeeded, the husband and wife were still married to one another, and had therefore committed bigamy by remarrying.

The Queen’s Proctor’s application was heard by Sir James Munby, the former President of the Family Division. To keep this post to a reasonable length, I will summarise his judgment very briefly. The central question, he said, was: was whether the decrees made by the court were void, or merely voidable. If they were void, then they were nullities, and the parties were still married to one another. If they were merely voidable, on the other hand, he could decide not to have them set aside. He decided that they were voidable (you can read his reasons for this in paragraph 103 of the judgment) and that they would not be set aside. The district judge was right to amend the petition, and therefore the decree nisi would be amended to reflect that the divorce was on the basis of behaviour, rather than separation and consent. Accordingly, the decree absolute remained valid – the parties were divorced, and had not committed bigamy.

To be honest, I found my eyebrows rising a little when I read the judgment. Whilst one obviously has enormous sympathies with the parties – they were victims of the failure of the court to spot the irregularity – the law seems to me to be quite clear, and it had not been followed. It is all very well to say, as Sir James did, that “the modern judicial conscience would revolt” if it were compelled to say that the divorce was a nullity, but the simple fact remained that parliament had decreed that the two years must elapse before the presentation of the petition, and it had not. And to retrospectively alter the divorce to behaviour after the event seems to me to be stretching logic beyond breaking point – the divorce had never happened, so it could not be amended. Still, what do I know, I am just a humble hack, not the former President of the Family Division.

You can read Sir James’s full judgment, including his searing criticism of the unavailability of legal aid for the wife (see paragraphs 116 to 122), here.

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Author: John Bolch

Mr Justice Mostyn explains the changing rationale behind spousal maintenance

Whilst you may not agree with everything that Mr Justice Mostyn says (and you will not be alone), it is always good to listen to him (or to read his words, as the case may be). The other day the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary website published the text of a speech given by him at the Devon and Somerset Law Society last October, and it does not disappoint.

The subject of the speech was spousal maintenance, and specifically: “Where did it come from, where is it now, and where is it going?” Mr Justice Mostyn answers these questions by tracing the history of spousal maintenance from 1857 (when secular divorce arrived) to the present day.

The pre-present day section of the speech is quite fascinating, but obviously the present day rationale behind spousal maintenance will be of more interest to readers of this blog. All I want to mention about the ‘old days’ is that, as Mr Justice Mostyn explains, the courts were then very much the ‘keepers of morals’ when it came to spousal maintenance, as demonstrated by a 1905 case in which the judge said that when considering whether to make a spousal maintenance order, and if so how much it should be for, “the Court should endeavour to promote virtue and morality and to discourage vice and immorality”. Thus, for example, an innocent wife would be granted maintenance, and a guilty wife (for example, because she had committed adultery) would not.

Thankfully, those days are now long behind us. Now, as Mr Justice Mostyn also explains, the most common rationale for imposing the obligation for one spouse to maintain the other into the future is to meet needs which the relationship has generated. For this reason, he says: “the factors of duration of marriage and the birth of children are so important. It is hard to see how a relationship has generated needs in the case of a short childless marriage, although this is not impossible.” The classic example of relationship-generated needs is where the wife gives up her career to bring up the family.

He goes on to address the topical point of why in our system, unlike others, spousal maintenance is not always for a limited period, and can last for the rest of the recipient’s life. The answer is that in some cases, such as where the wife has given up a lucrative career, the loss is irrecoverable. “For many women”, he says, “the marriage is the defining economic event of their whole lives and the decisions made in it may well reverberate for many years after its ending.”

Mr Justice Mostyn then goes on to set out his own summary of the relevant principles behind spousal maintenance, given by him in the 2014 case SS v NS (at paragraph 46). These principles, he says, seem to have withstood the test of time, and they should, I think, be compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.

But those principles do not go into detail regarding the assessment of the quantum of need. Mr Justice Mostyn points out that in three different recent cases the needs of the wife have been assessed at £25 million, £62 million, and the remarkable sum of £224 million. As he quite rightly says:

“Plainly “needs” does not mean needs. It is a term of art. Obviously, no-one actually needs £25m, or £62m, or £224m for accommodation and sustenance. The main drivers in the discretionary exercise are the scale of the payer’s wealth, the length of the marriage, the applicant’s age and health, and the standard of living, although the latter factor cannot be allowed to dominate the exercise.”

OK, like Mr Justice Mostyn I will end by returning to that morality point. Incredibly, as he explains, that moral outlook in relation to family law matters still exists in some quarters, despite being thoroughly dealt with by Sir James Munby, former President of the Family Division, who said:

“Judges are no longer custos morum [‘keepers of morals’] of the people, and if they are they have to take the people’s customs as they find them, not as they or others might wish them to be. Once upon a time, as we have seen, the perceived function of the judges was to promote virtue and discourage vice and immorality. I doubt one would now hear that from the judicial Bench. Today, surely, the judicial task is to assess matters by the standards of reasonable men and, of course, women.”

If you want to read the full speech (and I recommend that you do), you can find a link to it here.

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Author: John Bolch