London's reputation as the divorce capital of the world is cemented by big-money cases, with £100m-plus settlements now common and judges willing to investigate spouses who hide their wealth, according to family lawyers.
This year saw Russian businessman Mikhail Kroupeev's £100m divorce, while last year US billionaire Michael Fuch made a £36m settlement. Both were dwarfed by the record-breaking £554m settlement that Fiona Shackleton — King Charles's lawyer in his divorce from Diana — secured for Princess Haya bint Hussein in her divorce from Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum in 2021.
Why London attracts the ultra-rich
“London is still the divorce capital of the world”, says Emily Kapoor from Katz Partners, whose partner Davina Katz represented Ecotricity tycoon Dale Vince in his £43m divorce. Legal costs alone in such cases can easily exceed £5m.
“Who gets in first, in which country, can be important”, says Claire Gordon, partner at Farrer & Co who represented a tech billionaire's wife awarded £230m last year — Britain's third largest ever divorce payout. “If you have an internationally mobile UHNW family, who spend 100 days in the UK, 50 days Gstaad and 100 days in California, there is a potential debate as to where they reside and the jurisdiction that should hear their divorce.”
The lure of the equal split
If you're the home-maker, you usually want your case heard in London because “England sees marriage as an equal partnership whatever the couple's respective roles”, Gordon explains, which means assets are equally split.
“There have always been big-money cases in London but in the nearly 30 years I've been doing this there's been an exponential rise in the amounts being awarded,” says Gordon. “When I was junior family lawyer if we had a £30m divorce case that was notable, whereas now it's not unusual to have clients with a £100m settlement.”
Gordon frequently oversees UHNW divorces where clients are splitting international homes — “you get Maine, I'll have New York. Whoever gets the house may get the contents. Emotions can flare if one partner has managed a major refurb. Or if she's giving up the ski chalet, she might argue she should be bought a replacement in the settlement.” She's helped couples divide yachts, cars, horses, designer clothes and Birkin bag collections.
Spend, spend, spend
London affords particularly generous maintenance payments. If the asset split isn't enough to meet the income needs of one party, ongoing maintenance can be awarded on the basis of the couple's married lifestyle. “Horses and art can be expensive hobbies, or the cost of flying pets around the world in private jets,” Gordon notes.
One wealthy divorcee revealed her lawyer advised her to spend, spend, spend: “She said your bill for cosmetics is very low — you need to spend more! We'd always used private jets, so I had to start buying airline tickets to show how much I travelled. I went and spent thousands on a bracelet that I hate just to show I could spend £7,000 a day.”
Gordon warns divorcing women against over-inflating expenses. “If it looks like suddenly Gucci and Prada where before it was Longchamp, it's very noticeable and judges aren't impressed.” But Kapoor often sees it. “Our old office used to be around the corner from Selfridges and they'd disappear and sink £75,000.”
England is “a good jurisdiction if you think that your husband or wife is hiding money because judges here have the tools and the appetite to investigate that,” says Kapoor. “If a husband claims he doesn't have any money, but is going on yachts and driving Ferraris, a judge can make an award based on what they believe he is worth — that's pretty unique.”
Recently Varsha Gohil won a £6.6m payout after it took 23 years to prove her convicted money-launderer ex-husband had hidden his £28m fortune. It is Britain's longest divorce case.
A sophisticated field
“Usually the husband would rather have the divorce go through pretty much anywhere in the world rather than London”, says Ayesha Vardag, star lawyer of her eponymous Vardags firm. She helped turn London into the divorce capital of the world when she represented German heiress Katrin Radmacher in 2010, whose landmark Supreme Court case changed English law by making prenuptial agreements legally enforceable.
The appeal of London is “a combination of the 50-50 split”, the principle that all assets built up during the marriage are equally shared, and “the fact that English judges will look at the reality of the asset base, not be fobbed off with wealth-concealing structures”, Vardag explains.
She says her work is “the equivalent of doing a massive global, corporate or financial de-merger. It involves all sorts of financial forensic skills to track down assets, and value them, and working out complex corporate and trusts structures to determine ownership and access to money — it's become an immensely sophisticated field.”
Vardag has seen the grubby side. In one case a female client came into her office, “opened up a big bag of sex toys and shook them all over the table in our conference room saying: 'Look what he's been making me do.'” Cases can be both tragic and farcical, like one of a couple who hit the other over the head with a beefsteak because they were having an argument about whether the wife was going to cook her husband steak.
Yet, despite reputations, Vardag insists divorce lawyers aren't in the habit of dirty tricks. “Perhaps in days gone by lawyers would be nastier. Now there's much more of a sense of responsibility that you're dealing with a family and very often with children. You're dealing with people's mental health and being absolutely vile and destroying all prospect of a future relationship between a couple that are going to need to co-parent, it's contrary to our moral responsibility.”
One wealthy divorcee agrees. “It's a terribly emotional time and nobody behaves particularly well. These are people you loved and had children with. Even the rich are humans.”
