Last week’s judgment in the divorce case of Joy v Joy-Morancho didn’t work out well for either side.

The ex-wife failed to secure half of her ex-husband’s reported assets of £54m. But champagne corks were hardly popping in the ex-husband’s camp, either. For a start he was ordered to make periodical payments of £120,000. He was also forced to write a cheque for £334,263 to cover his ex-wife’s legal costs, after what judge Sir Peter Singer described as ‘scandalous and outrageous conduct’.

Singer wasn’t finished there. In a 245-paragraph judgment, he lambasted the ex-husband’s case, memorably labelling it ‘a rotten edifice founded on concealment and misrepresentation and therefore a sham, a charade, bogus, spurious and contrived’.

So it took spin on the Shane Warne scale for a law firm to slap out a self-congratulatory press release the week after publication. National firm DWFM Beckman, with help from Maltin PR, proclaimed the unprecedented nature of a case ‘where a wife claiming millions of pounds was given nothing because the husband has been able to show that he does not have any assets available to him’.

The firm was apparently ‘extremely pleased with the main thrust of the judgment’.

While the ‘main thrust’ is a matter of opinion, one element of the judgment was captured by the comment that: ‘The reality as I have found it to be is that from the very outset he has deliberately set about obscuring the true situation as to past, present and future’.

Anyone who read the press release would search in vain for the judge’s comment that ‘in my book the correct analysis is that neither party has won’.

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