Ex-UBS CFO Wins UK Top Court Case Over £133 Million Divorce
(Bloomberg) — A former UBS Group AG executive can hold onto the majority of his wealth after the UK’s top court ruled in his favor in a divorce fight with his ex-wife over the split of their £133 million ($182 million) estate.
Clive Standish’s former wife, Anna, brought the legal challenge to the Supreme Court after her ex-husband won an earlier decision that he should keep the majority of their wealth. Her appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court, according to a judgment handed down on Wednesday.
Standish, who was the chief financial officer at the Swiss bank in the lead up to the financial crisis, has been embroiled in a more than five-year long dispute with Anna over their divorce settlement. The pair were battling over a sum of around £80 million transferred to Anna a few years before their divorce in order to avoid paying inheritance tax.
The wife, who had kept the money, had sought to argue that the funds were effectively a gift to her and should be split 50-50.
But the court disagreed, saying in a unanimous decision that the money was not “being treated by the husband and wife for any period of time as an asset that was shared between them.”
The case has been taken all the way to the Supreme Court in large part because of the wealth of assets — which included a 6,000 acre (2,428 hectares) estate in Australia with more than 5,700 Merino sheep — that were there to be fought over.
The ruling will move British courts further away from the principle that divorcing couples should have their assets equally split even if the bulk of wealth was created by one partner over the other. It’ll have far reaching consequences in future high net worth divorces where ownership of assets change hands.
In many marriages “you do some estate planning and you’re not intending to give those things necessarily to that person,” Amy Radnor, a lawyer at Farrer & Co who wasn’t involved in the case, said. “That’s the part of it that’s relatable because a lot of people can say, well, most of what we built up, we built up together.”
The judges concluded that the transfer was intended to establish “offshore trusts to benefit the two children.” The Standish estate faced an approximate £32 million inheritance tax bill if he died in the UK while domiciled.
The ruling effectively upholds a Court of Appeal decision last year that reduced the amount Anna would receive from £45 million to £25 million and leave her husband with £107 million.
The judgment will “give the courts a clear framework to ensure individuals cannot benefit from running false arguments as to whether they had or had not agreed to share certain assets during the currency of their relationship.” Sam Longworth, a lawyer for Clive Standish, said in a statement.
London’s divorce courts are a popular destination for high-value legal fights, with judges typically prepared to order a more equal share of a couple’s assets. In the UK, the largest publicly known payout in a divorce is currently £450 million to the wife of billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov — though the two settled with a payment of less than one-third of that amount.
Though the judgment brings clarity on some issues at stake in the Standish marriage, lawyers had hoped that the case could provide further clarity on when assets are “matrimonialised” in a marriage, Radnor of Farrer & Co. said.
“We see a lot of uncertainty where one person owns a house or a flat before and then they marry somebody and that person moves into their house,” Radnor said. The judgment “doesn’t go into a lot of detail, and lawyers had hoped that they might try and narrow the matrimonial criteria further.”
(Updates with impact on UK divorce law in the seventh paragraph)
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