Supreme Court: Possession No Longer Nine Tenths of the Law in Divorce

A couple of weeks ago, we highlighted the divorce case of Standish v Standish where Mr Standish, an ex banker in his 70s made a transfer of wealth, some £77.8m for tax planning reasons in 2017 to his then wife, Mrs Standish, a non-UK domiciled spouse at the time (domicile status has now been removed under UK law), in her late 50s.  They separated in 2020 with divorce proceedings then following.

Firstly it should be understood that non-matrimonial assets such as inherited wealth and assets build up before marriage are no longer treated as ‘matrimonial assets’ after marriage i.e., jointly owned and jointly shared on divorce.  There has been various test cases over the last 5-10 years to prove this.

The £77.8m of assets transferred to his then wife, were deemed in part as matrimonial property by the High Court despite the fact that it was all built up by Mr Standish before marriage and had never been used as matrimonial assets despite the fact that it had been transferred to Mrs Standish for tax planning reasons.  At the time of divorce, of the combined £132m estate, Mr Standish was awarded £87m and Mrs standish some £45m on a 60/40 split  This was appealed by Mr Standish and the Court of Appeal ruled that despite £77.8m being transferred in Mrs Standish’s name, the wealth was still not matrimonial assets and the award for Mrs Standish was reduced to £25m in recognition of a 50% share matrimonial assets built up since marriage.

See Pre Matrimonial Assets on Divorce

This was taken to a final level of appeal with the Supreme Court to finally clarify and rule on what are matrimonial assets and be included in a divorce settlement and what are non-matrimonial assets.

2^nd July 2025 Supreme Court

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued its final ruling and backed the Court of Appeal’s decision that non-matrimonial assets cannot be considered as matrimonial assets just because ownership has changed for tax or planning reasons.  Non-matrimonial assets can only be considered as matrimonial assets when they have truly been used for the betterment, improvement or daily living requirements of a married couple.

Read the full judgement:  https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0089_judgment_8c95f0cffe.pdf

Comment

It will now be much harder to prove that inherited wealth or wealth before marriage should be included in a divorce settlement as possession is no longer “Nine Tenths of the Law”.

We have to say, we agree with the ruling, and it should indeed be considered that ‘predatory marriages’, which we are not saying the above was, but many of us will have seen examples of predatory marriages, will become less frequent.  No more ‘sugar daddies’ or ‘sugar mommas’ are out there now predatory folks.