Case No. EWFC-136

2.The Husband is French. He was born in 1966, so he is now 56 years old. He is the Chairman of Industrial Investment Banking at B Bank. The Wife is French/Lebanese/British. She was born in 1968. She is therefore aged 54. She has had a career in the bottled water industry, particularly working in a senior capacity for C Group. More recently, she made a success out of her own business, S Co, which she sold for a significant sum of money. She is now considering a new business venture.3.The Wife had moved to France from Abu Dhabi in 1975. The parties met and commenced a relationship in October 1986. Both were studying in Higher Education. In 1991, the wife started working for C Group. The husband was undertaking a Masters Degree in Paris. In 1992, he worked in London for approximately 18 months. The parties became engaged in the summer of 1993. The Wife says they began cohabiting in Fontainebleau, France in September 1993 when the Husband was undertaking an MBA at INSEAD. He denies cohabitation but nothing turns on it. 4.On 16 June 1994, in contemplation of their marriage, the parties signed a Marriage Contract. The circumstances leading up to this are hotly in dispute. There is no doubt, however, that the principal of the firm of Notaries instructed, Michel Morin, was the Wife’s family’s Notary. The parties only attended at the firm once, namely on 16 June 1994 when they saw Notary Agnes Braun. It is right that the document actually says that the Contract was witnessed by Michel Morin. Both parties accept that this is not correct. I take the view that nothing turns on this as it is not contended that this anomaly would make the Contract unenforceable in France. The meeting lasted approximately one hour. The parties signed the Contract. It is the Husband’s case that the Notary explained to them both the significance of the Contract and how it would operate. The Wife says she has no recollection of what occurred at all. I will have to make findings. 5.The Marriage Contract is a straightforward “separation de biens” contract. The English translation says, at Article One, that “the future spouses declare that they are adopting the SEPARATION OF PROPERTY regime as established by Articles 1536 and 1541 of the Civil Code”. There are then four further Articles, dealing with Presumptions of Ownership; Household Expenses; Option of Acquisition or Assignment; and Conditions for the Exercise of the Option of Acquisition or Assignment.6.The parties then entered a Civil Marriage on 2 July 1994 before conducting a Religious Marriage in Church on 23 July 1994. They moved to the United Kingdom in September 1994. They have been here ever since. The Husband commenced working for A Bank in London. The Wife was working for J Ltd which was a C Group company. They rented a property in London before buying a flat in their joint names in August 1995. In 1996, the Wife moved to work for C Group in London before being appointed as Head of Marketing for bottled waters. Although she had to reduce her working hours at times due to her commitments to the children, she was appointed Marketing Director in 2003. Around the same time, the Husband moved to M Bank.7.They have three children. The eldest, S, was born in 1997. She is now aged 24 and is working in Dubai. O was born in 1999 and is therefore aged 22. She is undertaking a Masters in Entertainment & Media Law at a university in France. The youngest, C, was born in 2005 and is aged 17. He is at school in London. 8.The former matrimonial home, in London W11 was bought in joint names on 6 November 2006 for £2.22 million. It has very recently been sold for £4.6 million. The parties have interests in a number of other properties in France that they have inherited/been gifted by their respective families. They also acquired three further properties. The first, P House in Hampshire was bought in their joint names on 27 August 2010 for £1.35 million. It has also been sold very recently for £2.75 million. In August 2010, a ski apartment was acquired in the French Alps in the sole name of the Husband for €1,040,000. The Wife contributed €35,000. The Husband says she was subsequently recompensed by him funding works on her ski apartment. This much smaller studio apartment was also acquired in the same building. It is held in an SCI with 1,000 shares. Each of the children has 333 shares and the Wife holds 1 share.9.The Wife left C Group in 2007. The following year she commenced a marketing consultancy company. The Husband left M Bank in 2008 and joined N Bank, which later merged with B Bank, his current employers. In 2015, the Wife commenced SCo with her business partner importing fruit flavoured water. She sold the business in July 2017, receiving immediate consideration of £809,000 gross together with a deferred sum but she had to continue working in the business until December 2021. From 2019, she worked three days per week with a reduced salary of £48,000 per annum. She received the final payment of £529,437 gross on 24 June 2022. Capital Gains Tax of £71,063 is payable. 10.The Husband became Co-Global Head of Industrial Investment Banking at B Bank in 2016. He ceased his management duties in November 2019 but remained looking after around twenty large clients with the new title of Chairman. There is no doubt that he has earned very large sums during the marriage. His case is that his income has now become dependent on the fees that he earns, although his basic salary is £500,000 with a supplemental compensation allowance of $650,000. Luckily, in 2020, he was able to advise his biggest client on a Merger and Acquisition deal which generated fee income of $17 million for the Bank together with derivative hedging income of $26 million. As a consequence, his total compensation for the year 2021 was $3 million. 11.The marriage broke down during 2020. The Wife issued a divorce petition on 25 May 2020. There was a half-hearted attempt by the Husband to invoke the French jurisdiction but Decree Nisi was pronounced here on 22 February 2021. It has not, as yet, been made Absolute. The Wife moved out of the matrimonial home on 4 September 2020. She has since resided in rented accommodation, first in W11 and more recently in W8.12.After her Form A was issued on 6 October 2020, both parties filed Forms E. The Wife’s is dated 5 January 2021. I will not set out details of her financial resources at this stage other than to say she said her net assets were £4,087,788. She does own one property in France jointly with her brother in Brittany, but it is occupied by her parents. Her parents had transferred it to their children in November 2009 whilst retaining the usufruct. She put her income needs at £298,956 per annum, although she has since accepted that the figure is too high. She said that the children’s income needs were £135,360 per annum. She put her capital needs at £7 million, made up of a four bedroom house in Notting Hill, including the costs of purchase, at £4 million; a ski chalet in the French Alps at £1.3 million and a holiday home in France at £1.5 million. The remaining sum of £200,000 was for furniture, furnishings and decoration. She described the standard of living during the marriage as high. She said that she did not understand the consequence of the Marriage Contract.13.The Husband’s Form E is dated 6 January 2021. Again, I will deal with the detail of his assets later but he calculated that they had a total value, net of liabilities, of £13,507,190. He confirmed that he has interests in five other properties in France, all of which were inherited from or gifted to him by his family. Moreover, he only has a share of each such property. He put his income needs at £117,828 per annum plus £19,860 per annum for the children. In the same way that the Wife’s figures were too high, I take the view that these figures were too low. In both cases, the parties had decided to tailor their figures for litigation purposes. He then said that he may need to move to France for work due to Brexit. He confirmed that he had had a “reasonable” year but said that there remained a risk of redundancy due to his age. He described the standard of living as “very comfortable”. He added that it was the Wife’s family who arranged the Marriage Contract. He did say that the parties ran their financial lives in accordance with the contract by keeping their assets apart, such as the proceeds of sale of the Wife’s business which she retained. He ended by saying that he had inherited from his family already whereas he claimed that the Wife’s inheritance is yet to come. 14.The First Directions Appointment took place at the Family Court at Willesden before Deputy District Judge Lynds on 10 February 2021. The judge made provision for the case to be heard by a Tier 4 High Court Judge and gave some fairly standard directions. There was a direction for a pensions report by George Mathieson of Mathieson Consulting Limited. It included a direction for calculating the most cost effective way of dividing the pension provision available so as to achieve equality of pension income when the parties reach the age of 60, 65 and 67. As I understand it, this direction was made by consent but I will be returning to this topic later in this judgment. At this stage, all I say is that I cannot conceive of a more inappropriate direction when the assets in the case are between £22 and £28 million. 15.The case was allocated to me and listed before me for directions on 9 July 2021. Various valuations were agreed for the purposes of the Financial Dispute Resolution Hearing (“FDR”). I made a number of other directions for answers to questions and valuations, as well as directing witness statements from the parties as to the significance of the Marriage Contract. The FDR took place before Sir Jonathan Cohen on 5 October 2021 but, regrettably, the parties failed to reach a consensus. There was a direction for the Husband to file tax advice as to assets that he held offshore. This final hearing was set down before me. The Pre-Trial Review took place before me on 27 January 2022. The parties agreed that their two English properties should be sold in advance of the final hearing. Given the current turmoil in the markets, it seems pretty clear that this was an inspired agreement that has worked to their significant financial advantage. The pension report of Mathieson Consulting had still not been received so I took the opportunity to remove the requirement for calculations to achieve equality of income. It does appear that Mr Mathieson had not understood this change as his eventual report did include such calculations.