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A Superior Court judge, in granting a woman a divorce decree, has found that her estranged husband has not yet fully disclosed his financial situation and has behaved “mean” and “mean” to her.
The man had tried to describe himself as a “reasonable” man who wanted only the right and wanted the best for his ex-wife, Judge Max Barrett said. However, over a prolonged period, he misbehaved towards her, demanding that, when she is short on money, she repeatedly hires lawyers and seeks all kinds of orders against her, including paying her share of the utility bills, said the judge.
She had behaved in a “volatile” manner, with the result that the woman previously obtained a provisional exclusion order against her, later replaced by a related compromise.
The woman was so scared that she left the family home at one point.
While the man maintained that he had never been violent towards her, “by which he presumably means that he did not hit her,” that amounted to confusing the nature of a provisional prohibition order and the compromise.
The couple currently live separately in a divided family home and the man has started making noise at irregular hours and had argued that the woman required court orders to cross into their section to turn on the heat.
He also tried to introduce an intimate and irrelevant detail from the woman’s “distant past” that he “insensibly, even cruelly” described as “baggage”, before the court detained him.
“If a man is inclined to treat his estranged wife with such indifference / discourtesy in court, he will find himself facing an uphill battle in trying to establish that he is more generally a reasonable man.”
The couple married a few years ago and have grown children. They have been separated for more than two years and the wife said there was no possibility of reconciliation.
Disastrous
The judge said that they both had gambled heavily on the property with borrowed money, but the woman, in the mid-1990s, became concerned about her financial exposure, refused to be more involved in it, and instead combined the fact from being a stay at home mom to running her own business.
The man, who appeared to have “a soft spot for the real estate game,” went on and persuaded some of his sons to join him, causing the children’s lives and / or credit ratings to be “considerably ruined.” .
All the real estate bets came to a “disastrous end” when the real estate bubble burst around 2008, after which one creditor obtained a judgment in the many millions in respect of secured loans on a particular property and a second appointed a receiver over the couple’s mortgaged loans. properties.
The judge contrasted the couple’s response to their financial problems, saying that the woman constantly sought, in a “sincere and sensible” way, to reach some kind of agreement with the creditors and with her husband.
Although the man argued that he has done the same, “unfortunately, he has not always done so.”
The woman’s “constant realism” consistently yielded proposed settlement agreements, including the one now in court, but the man never achieved similar success.
The current situation is that the man, despite having “every opportunity” to remedy his behavior and provide full details of his financial affairs, has not done so. However, the woman wants to get divorced and have her financial affairs resolved to the greatest extent possible.
The judge said he would grant a divorce decree and issue orders on the division of assets.
It noted that a creditor had agreed to take a fraction of the “huge” sum owed to it as a full and final settlement, having considered what is practically realizable with the remaining assets.
Both creditors are to be commended for their focus on the settlement agreements reached with the woman’s advisers, which included the sale of the family home and other assets, the arrangement of which was “very substantially in the benefit of the man.”
He made orders for the sale of the family home and gave the woman the only residence there pending sale. The man must leave in eight weeks. The woman can go to court in the meantime if she continues her difficult behavior and walks into his section to turn on the heat.
After a mortgage is paid with the proceeds of the sale, agreed payments will be made to creditors with the net proceeds of the sale. The distribution of any remaining product will be decided later by the court. An order for the sale of other properties was placed with the distribution of income to be decided later.
Other orders include the man withholding his “generous” pension but, if he dies before the woman, she will be entitled to various pension benefits.
The woman will keep a property that she had inherited in her own right and where she operates her business and was also declared the owner of 50% of a share in another apparently marital property.
For reasons including the lack of adequate financial disclosures, the judge ordered the man to pay half of the woman’s legal costs.
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