Husband loses £18m claim in ‘secret millionaires’ divorce case

High Court judge Mr Justice Bodey ruled in May 2010 that the husband should get £5m. The husband appealed, saying he should have been given £18m. Three appeal judges dismissed his appeal yesterday.

It emerged during the case that the Israeli couple, despite their vast wealth, lived in a £225,000 semi-detached house, drove the same “modest” car for many years and sent their three children to state schools.

Judges heard the couple had “assiduously sought” to create a “normal life” for their children – aged between 16 and nine.

Family friends were unaware of “even the broad scale” of the woman’s wealth and the youngsters were not provided with the “security” normally given to the children of the wealthy. The judges ruled that the couple should not be named in order to protect the children.

The appeal court heard that following the divorce, the husband wanted to sell the semi-detached house, buy a property worth around £2m near Regent’s Park in central London, plus a second home worth £450,000 in Israel, and get a new £60,000 car.

Mr Justice Bodey had concluded that £5m was more than generous in meeting the husband’s needs.

The husband said the judge’s reasoning had “betrayed discrimination”. His lawyers argued that the couple shared “household functions” and said it had been “invidious” to “rate one contribution as more significant than the other”.

The appeal judges rejected the husband’s arguments.

“To find that, on top of the efforts of equal value made by each party in the home, the wife made a financial contribution to the marriage of great importance is not to discriminate between the parties in any unacceptable way,” said one, Lord Justice Wilson. “On the contrary it correctly recognises a substantive difference.”

Lord Justice Wilson said the facts of the case were “extreme”.

“Throughout the marriage neither party generated any earned income. They had no need to,” he said. “In comparison with the size of the wife’s wealth, and of the income generated by it, particularly in the later years, the parties pursued an extraordinarily modest lifestyle.”

Judges heard that the 52-year-old woman and the 49-year-old man started living together in Israel in 1986 and married after moving to England in 1991.

Their marriage had broken down in 2007.

The woman’s fortune came from a company her scientist grandfather set up in Israel.