ZZ21D58773 - [2025] EWHC 1659 (Fam)

H is in his early fifties and W is in her mid-forties. They met one another at the very end of the last century; at that time H would have been in his late twenties and W in her early twenties. At the time they met, W was working in customer services and H was working as a second-hand car salesman. W owned a terraced house which she had bought in 1999 for £79,000. I do not know what other assets W owned nor do I know what, if any assets, H held at that time. The parties began to cohabit in rented accommodation in about 2000, according to W, or about 2001, according to H. Nothing turns on the date of cohabitation nor indeed on the assets either party held at that date. In 2001, W gave up her then employment as a shop manager. She has not been employed since.

In February 2002, H’s father purchased a property for H as a 30th birthday present, on the basis that H would repay his father the initial capital investment on any future sale. The parties lived at that property. In about January 2003, the family business, ABC was incorporated. ABC bought, sold and rented heavy plant. The business had been established by the parties in the early 2000s. In the mid 2000’s, W sold her property for £163,000. She says from the proceeds she invested about £55,000 into ABC. This would appear from the joint chronology to be a disputed fact, but W was not cross examined on the topic, nor were any submissions made to me about this. I have no reason to disbelieve W and I find that she made this investment. This is hardly surprising; she was a shareholder and officer of ABC and H’s committed partner, being pregnant with their first child.

The parties have three children. The oldest, a girl, A, was born in 2004 and is now 21. Their second child, a boy, B, was born in 2005 and is now 19. Their third child, another boy, C, was born in 2009, and he is now 16.

The parties married in mid 2006, formalising the status of their committed relationship. That relationship was, what might be termed, traditional. H ran the family business and W ran the family home. Each in their own way made equally valuable contributions to their relationship, throughout its duration.

In about 2008, the parties acquired a second corporate entity which later changed its name, several times, eventually becoming, in 2019, DEF. I think both parties were originally shareholders in and certainly both were officers of DEF, at various times.

In June 2009, H’s property was sold. The agreed chronology tells me that the proceeds were used to repay H’s father, to fund a deposit on the family’s new home, ’The Family Home’, to pay for renovations on that property and to purchase GH a yard on an industrial estate as a business premises. The latter proposition is probably wrong as the transfer of GH is recorded in a Strettons valuation report dated August 2017 as having occurred in 2008, nearly a year before the sale of H’s property. I record this to demonstrate the difficulties that spouses inevitably have in trying to reconstruct the history of their marriages and the dangers of reliance on memory, even when the purported memory is agreed. My understanding is that the yard at GH was formally purchased within DEF. It appears to me that the distinction between ABC and DEF was an entirely legitimate but artificial means of dividing the business between trading company, ABC, and holding company, DEF. To the parties there would have been only one entity – the family business.

That family business was plainly prospering. The new family home, was a substantial five-bedroom Art Deco property. The family lived in it until 2015, when they moved into the annexe at the property in order to demolish and rebuild the main property. I have seen photographs of the renovated property. It is by any standard an attractive and prestigious c 6,700 square foot house. The parties lived in the four-bedroom, c 2,400 square foot annexe until 2017, when the family moved back to the main house.

The parties’ marriage was, on a least two occasions, rocky. In 2014, there were serious arguments between the parties and in 2018 there was a period of separation for five months. Both parties raised points about each other’s behaviour at these junctures in their written and oral evidence. Those issues are of no relevance to the enquiry I am conducting, but raising such matters seems to be an almost inevitable part and parcel of the dismantling of a very long relationship such as this.

W says that from 2016 ABC began to expand and H needed to travel away from home regularly. At some point between 2017 and 2019, the parties met Mr YZ. W puts the date early and H late in that period. It would appear that, in that period, or perhaps from 2016, ABC’s trade began to include decommissioning work dismantling heavy plant such as oil platforms and steel structures. In July 2020, GHI was incorporated. It was owned jointly by H and YZ. GHI undertook one decommissioning project, referred to as the P Project, which commenced in 2021.

In January 2021, machinery was transferred from ABC to DEF, with DEF settling the finance on those transferred assets. GHI rented some of that machinery for the P Project. In May 2021, LM1 Ltd was incorporated. LM1 was held in equal shares by H and YZ. In mid 2021, LM1 purchased LM2 from a property developer. LM2 owned LM, a port originally built or developed as a production site for oilrigs. Thus the transaction represented the purchase of a disused port facility. I will in due course revert to a more detailed account of GHI and LM1. That same month H purchased a Porsche for W as a birthday gift. The Porsche was purchased by DEF but it was quite plainly to be used by W and presented to her as gift in front of the children.

In the Autumn of 2021, the parties separated. W and the children remained living at the Family Home. H lived in his rented accommodation near NP and later in Mayfair, both paid for by DEF.