A husband ‘specifically and deliberately sought to isolate’ his now ex-wife ‘from her own trusted lawyer…for his own advantage’, a family court judgment has found. In what is understood to be the third-largest divorce settlement in English legal history, Mr Justice Cobb awarded the wife, PN, £230,778,588 – around 44% of the marital assets.

The couple were divorced in April after 20 years of marriage. When they separated their ‘accrued fortune was said to be in excess of £1.5bn…now said to be somewhere between £460-540m’. Legal costs amounted to some £5.5m, the judgment in PN v SA said.

The husband, SA, a ‘serial entrepreneur’, and wife made a post-nuptial agreement in 2023. However the judge found the agreement was ‘not a complete and concluded agreement’ and its English language version ‘could not and did not reflect an agreement on which both parties were ad idem’. 

‘I find that the husband deployed a number of tactics to frighten the wife into agreeing with his proposals for financial settlement in 2022-2023,’ the judgment said. The husband used ‘scare tactics’ which ‘cumulatively…had a significant impact on the wife, on her self-confidence, and on her free will’.

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It added: ‘Independent and objective legal scrutiny is an essential safeguard to fairness where parties are seeking to achieve a negotiated settlement of a financial dispute – particularly one of this magnitude. I am satisfied that the husband consciously took steps to keep the lawyers on both sides away (as far as possible) from the negotiations until he believed that there was a signed deal.’

Referring to SA’s attempts to ostracise the wife’s lawyer, the judge said he was ‘satisfied that the husband specifically and deliberately sought to isolate the wife from her own trusted lawyer, and sought to drive a wedge between them for his own advantage’.

He added: ‘The husband knew or reasonably suspected that Ms [Claire] Gordon [the wife’s solicitor] offered the wife not just legal advice but a degree of emotional support too.’

The judge said the husband’s communication and the way he referred and spoke about Gordon, a partner at Farrer & Co, ‘had the effect of increasing the wife’s sense of vulnerability at the risk of losing her main source of legal and to some degree emotional support at this crucial time’ as he intended. 'The husband knew or reasonably believed in my finding that if the wife showed the 2023 settlement agreement to Ms Gordon, the wife would be advised against confirming it.'

There was ‘no proper basis’ for the husband’s ‘immoderate and vindictive views’ of Gordon. ‘It was wrong of him to seek to exclude Ms Gordon from the discussions about the settlement,’ the judge said. ‘I find that he recognised in Ms Gordon a dedicated and conscientious lawyer who would in all likelihood appropriately and diligently protect her client’s interests. In that regard, the husband saw her as an obstacle to his objectives.’

Awarding the wife more than £230m, the judge said: ‘I am satisfied, from all that I have read and heard, that the wife was ultimately placed in a position of obvious disadvantage, without the ability to exercise any real self-determination or free will in relation to the negotiations in 2022-2023 on the division of marital assets.’

Had the parties been ‘properly advised by independent lawyers’ on the 2023 agreement, the court would have been ‘slow to interfere’.

Gordon said: ‘In this landmark judgment, the family court has recognised the strain that a build-up of persistent and attritional conduct places on relationships, and that this can ultimately erode a person’s free will.' She added that the judgment 'recognises the vital emotional support that family lawyers often provide to their clients, alongside legal advice'.