NEVER TEAR US APART: DISCLOSURE, GIFTS AND FAMILY RIFTS 

Published on 21 February, 2025 | Rebekah Fender

The importance of family ties can be seen and expressed in many different ways.

One of the most common is a centuries-old proverb explaining that “blood is thicker than water”.

Nevertheless, the bonds between kith and kin can still be tested and even broken, as a newly released Family Court ruling illustrates only too well (https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2024/415.html).

It involved a family with fabulous wealth and a “glamorous lifestyle”.

Yet I believe that it also serves as a useful reminder for spouses of rather more modest means about the need to be scrupulous in disclosing assets to avoid adding to the time, stress and cost of a broken marriage.

The case hinged on the circumstances surrounding the end of the relationship between Maria-Christina Copinger-Symes and her husband, James.

Ms Copinger-Symes, a former manager of the Australian rock band INXS, was described in court as part of a family, the de la Salas, who had amassed great wealth through business, mainly through their shipping interests.

Despite apparently having been her father’s favourite as a child, relations became strained, partly as a result of her separation and eventual divorce from James, a former Major in the SAS.

The couple agreed the financial terms of their divorce in March 2022, according to which Ms Copinger-Symes was to pay her ex-husband a lump sum of £850,000 as well as school fees for their four children.

When she did not, he went to court to enforce payment, a process which required him to disclose his assets.

As a result, Ms Copinger-Symes learned for the first time that he had been gifted £27.6 million by her family just months after their divorce settlement was finalised.

She subsequently went back to court, seeking to have the March 2022 financial order set aside.

Having considered testimony given in court during an eight-day hearing last May along with thousands of pages of documents submitted as part of the case, Judge Edward Hess concluded that Mr Copinger-Symes had not only known that he was to be gifted the huge sum but understood that it was being delayed to avoid the money being subject to a possible claim by his wife.

He said that evidence showed, for instance, that the husband had been viewing expensive properties which were “well out of his price range” long before the divorce settlement was agreed and the gift was made.

Furthermore, Judge Hess remarked upon a “troubling feature” of the proceedings; namely, that Ms Copinger-Symes’ mother, three siblings and ex-husband had all “deliberately coordinated” their accounts to undermine her set aside attempt.

Even if we discount the degree of wealth and rancour in this case for a moment, I should point out that attempts to reopen divorce settlements are not necessarily unusual.

It is something which is provided for under the protocols governing how issues before family courts in England and Wales are dealt with.

The Family Procedure Rules, as they’re known, describe how the qualifying grounds for a financial order being set aside include fraud, material non-disclosure, error or an unforeseen event “which invalidates the basis on which the order was made” (https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/family/practice_directions/pd_part_09a#Anchor13).

That said, the threshold for doing so is extremely high.

In this matter, Judge Hess determined that knowledge of an imminent large gift by Ms Copinger-Symes’ to her former husband would indeed have made a “significant difference” to the outcome.

As a result, he ruled that the “the March 2022 order must be set aside” and, despite there already being an “almost indefinitely long history of litigation” involving the family, they must now return to court for a fresh settlement to be thrashed out.

Cases which involve family wealth in the hundreds of millions are infrequent but certainly not unusual. Matters in which families side with their in-laws rather than their own children are, in my opinion, rather fewer in number.

The issue of disclosure is more common.

That should not come as a surprise, given that the very form on which spouses have to describe their respective assets specifies that only a “full, frank and clear disclosure” will suffice (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63c132468fa8f516ac0d5a6d/Form_E_0123_save.pdf).

Anything else, it continues, “may result in any order the court makes being set aside”.

Unfortunately, I cannot imagine that Judge Hess’s decision or the terms of any new financial order will make reconciliation between Ms Copinger-Symes and her family in any way likely.

Where it does help is in clarifying that attempts to conceal assets from the divorce courts can have considerable consequences.

Honesty, regardless of the size of someone’s fortune, is always the best policy.