CA-2024-000509 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1055

The judge having reserved judgment thereafter delivered his judgment orally. At the conclusion Ms Bangay drew to the judge’s attention the fact that, contrary to the judgment he had delivered, the wife had admitted in her statement that she had excluded assets. The judge said that he thought that he had said that ‘she knew that there were other things, but that she was scared about asking about them’. Ms Bangay reminded the judge that that was not what the wife had said in her statement and the judge said that he was: ‘very happy to make a correction to the transcript when it comes through, but I am confident that it does not make any difference to my decision’. Unfortunately, no such correction was made. Ms Bangay subsequently raised the absence of any chronology of the events leading up to the agreement or to the copy and paste email. The judge declined to expand his judgment.

Although Mr Harrison did not actively seek amplification of the judge’s judgment, at a consequentials hearing before the judge on 20 March 2024, he filed on behalf of the wife, a document which he called a ‘schedule of suggested amplifications’. This extensive document was designed, it would seem from the transcripts, to seek amplifications from the judge, if he felt it appropriate to do so, which if adopted would in effect provide an answer to the husband’s proposed grounds of appeal. Mr Harrison clarified to the judge that, at that stage he was not himself seeking permission to appeal, but he specifically reserved his position as to filing a Respondent’s Notice.

In my judgment the judge fell into error in his approach to the evidence regarding the wife’s non-disclosure. Had the judge adopted the approach of referring to the chronology of events and documents including the emails leading up to the signing of the agreement, a very different picture would have emerged. For example, important in relation to any finding about either undue pressure or material non-disclosure, was the ‘copy and paste’ email sent by the wife and adopted, to his significant detriment, by the husband. The judge made no reference to that email or to the fact that the wife had prevaricated in giving her oral evidence about the email, accepting only that it was in her ‘sent folder’ and saying that she had no recollection of writing or sending it. The judge did not consider the evidence given as to discussions between husband and wife which must have occurred between them before the email was sent and about which there was an evidential dispute.

Rather than a naïve young woman who did not know she had tens of millions of pounds of business assets in her name and was too in awe of her father to question him, on the totality of the evidence the wife not only decided (whether on instructions from her father or not) that the majority of her assets would not be disclosed, but also, by sending the husband the copy and paste email intended to be copied to her solicitors, put him in a position where in order to have any disclosure at all, he would not be able to get legal advice in relation to that disclosure. It will be recollected that the only legal advice that had been given to the husband was at a time when no disclosure had been made but was anticipated under the terms of the proposed agreement.

Further, the wife’s case that she was too uncertain, or did not think it to be appropriate to include the business assets in Annex A, provides no excuse whatsoever for her failure to include her interest in her mother’s house, an asset which had nothing to do with the father’s business and everything, she said in her statement, to do with tax.