Court of Appeal orders man to pay ex-wife $6 million
The Court of Appeal has ordered a man to pay his former wife $6 million after allowing his appeal in part to reduce the value of total matrimonial assets to $35 million in their divorce settlement.
The woman is now entitled to about $11.6 million worth of joint assets, including the matrimonial home valued at $3.95 million and other assets worth $1.7 million.
This came after the Court of Appeal upheld a High Court judge's earlier decision that the couple's total matrimonial assets should be divided 67:33 in favour of the husband, who is a co-founder of a venture capital fund.
The woman had also appealed against the decision.
She had sought to have the weightage between their direct and indirect contributions to their assets changed to 50:50, from the High Court judge's original weightage of 60:40 in favour of the husband.
According to judgment documents released yesterday, the couple were married for 17 years and have two children.
The woman, who had worked in senior executive roles at various banks, filed for divorce in September 2010 after the man unilaterally slashed the monthly family maintenance by a third to $5,000. She had found out in June that her husband had bought an apartment in Shanghai with his mistress as joint owner.
Both of them appealed against a High Court decision in November 2017 to split their matrimonial assets, valued at $38 million then, 67:33 in favour of the man.
In the latest ruling, the Court of Appeal, comprising High Court Justice Belinda Ang and Judges of Appeal Andrew Phang and Judith Prakash, found that the husband had acquired additional assets after November 2011, the month an interim judgment was granted.
This sum, amounting to $6.1 million should not have been included in the pool of matrimonial assets to be divided, the judges ruled.
However, as they found that the husband had not provided a full and frank disclosure of his assets, they valued the couple's assets at 10 per cent higher than the disclosed sum.
This ultimately contributed to the $35 million sum, of which $4.6 million was from the woman.
The court also ordered the man to pay his former wife $11,000 every month for the maintenance of their children.
He must also cover 75 per cent of the children's education expenses and the first child's growth hormone expenses.
His lawyers contended that these expenses should be divided equally between him and his ex-wife. They also argued that the expenses the High Court judge had adopted for calculation of the maintenance sum were too high.
The three judges, however, saw no basis on which to overturn the High Court judge's decision.
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