Wife who hid assets in pre-nup hit with costs penalties

A wealthy woman who hid her financial assets in a pre-nuptial agreement has been hit with the stiffest of costs penalties from the court. 

Judges from the Court of Appeal said in a short judgment today that Jenny Helliwell should pay indemnity costs for the entirety of the legal proceedings with her ex-husband Simon Entwistle. He had appealed a decision to uphold the pre-nuptial agreement entered on the day of his wedding where both parties agreed upon separation to walk away with the assets they had brought to the marriage.

Entwistle was awarded £400,000 by the Court of Appeal after showing that Helliwell failed to disclose the full extent of her £66m assets which broke the agreement.

Following the CoA ruling, Entwistle sought the £120,522 costs of the appeal, repayment of a costs order for £75,000 and £474,318 to cover costs up to and including the first hearing. His lawyers submitted that the court’s conclusion that Helliwell failed to disclose a significant proportion of her assets amounted to fraudulent non-disclosure.

Helliwell accepted she should pay the appeal costs but strongly opposed the application for costs to be assessed on the indemnity basis.

In a joint ruling on costs, Lady Justice King, Lord Justice Moylan and Lord Justice Snowden said that Helliwell’s deliberate non-disclosure could properly be characterised as fraudulent. She had induced her ex-husband to accept that her disclosure would be full and frank and deliberately failed to show the majority of her assets.

In court, she chose to maintain, when challenged at the hearing before the judge, that her deliberate non-disclosure was not dishonest and that the agreement should stand. The appeal judges said she also advanced a number of self-interested explanations relating to her own and her father’s tax affairs in an attempt to justify why she had chosen to mislead Entwistle.

‘We do not consider that such conduct can possibly be described as reasonable in relation to the use of a pre-nuptial agreement,’ they added. ‘Still less can it be regarded as the ordinary and reasonable conduct of proceedings in the Family Division. It was well “out of the norm”.’