A Goldman Sachs banker who spent thousands of pounds on a secret mistress using money from an account he shared with his wife has been stripped of £4million after a bitter divorce battle.
Ardal Loh-Gronager, 35, married businesswoman and heiress Wei-Lyn Loh in 2019.
He quit his job as a banker in order to support his ‘enormously wealthy’ wife and oversee the refurbishment of their mansion in Primrose Hill, London.
But the couple split in 2023 after it was revealed that Mr Loh-Gronager was having affair – a relationship described in High Court papers this week as ‘expensively financed’ and ‘parallel to his marriage’.
He would pay his mistress cash from a joint account he shared with Ms Loh. The payments were often disguised as ‘flowers’, and he even let his lover use his £200,000 Bentley, which had been a romantic pre-marriage gift to him from his wife.
The ex-husband also dipped into the account to transfer funds to himself and for investments.
Under a prenup agreement, the 35-year-old had been set to receive over £6.4million after the break-up.
But his 43-year-old ex dragged him to court accusing him of already having received about £4million from the joint account.
The court heard that Mr Loh-Gronager sought to ‘undermine, harass and unsettle’ his ex. This included sending a ‘lacklustre’ PI to stand outside her house pretending to be a doorstepping journalist and he set up a private Instagram profile to publish photos of her.
After the trial, Mr Justice Cusworth found that Mr Loh-Gronager’s payout should be slashed by around £4m to £2,369,385, due to the amounts he had already received and his general conduct, including ‘doctoring’ emails to boost his case in court.
He said Mr Loh-Gronager had made regular payments from the couple’s joint account to his girlfriend and had even transferred £1m from his wife’s account on the day she was undergoing a therapy session prior to the end of their relationship.
‘The fact that the husband began to take amounts from the joint account almost as soon as it was set up suggests that he has throughout the marriage been preparing the ground for as lucrative a separation as he could contrive,’ said the judge.
He added: ‘He has taken significant sums during the marriage from joint accounts funded by the wife. These accounts, pursuant to their agreement, were intended to provide primarily for the funding of their joint living expenses, as he knew.
‘The husband has then essentially put those funds into investments and accounts in his own name, later to maintain them to be his separate property.
‘He has then during the proceedings sought to undermine, harass and unsettle the wife, in the hope that she could be deterred from fighting on against him.’
The judge told the court that Mr Loh-Gronager’s actions were taken ‘with the object as I find of belittling her and embarrassing her’.
‘I find that he has callously and quite deliberately sought to cause upset to the wife in the hope that she would be persuaded to drop the case and leave him with the outcome he was seeking,’ he continued.
The court heard the couple began living together in 2015 and married in 2019, with the husband – who had worked for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and latterly Credit Suisse – quitting to oversee an expensive refurbishment of their London mansion.
Although Mr Loh-Gronager had himself been a successful banker. Ms Loh was ‘enormously wealthy,’ with most of her money sunk in business assets, as well as being the beneficiary of a family trust.
Their prenup allowed for Mr Loh-Gronager to receive a lump sum if they divorced, increasing with each year that they remained married, meaning that by the time they split he was due over £6.4m.
The money in the joint accounts had been intended to finance each of their lifestyles, but Mrs Loh said that much of the money her husband took was in fact invested in his business, contrary to their agreement.
Mr Loh-Gronager fought the case on the basis that the sums transferred were a continuation of a pattern of ‘transfers and gifts’ to him which began before their marriage.
He claimed that sums that were removed were to provide him with ‘financial security’ and that his ex was only now trying to undo the gifts ‘out of unhappiness and bitterness’.
As part of his case, Mr Loh-Gronager put forward a series of emails, which he said showed that his ex-wife had been aware of certain transfers and their reasons.
But pointing out that he had not provided the actual emails, but instead pdf copies, the judge found that they had in fact been ‘created and/or doctored’ by Mr Loh-Gronager to boost his case.
‘He has sought to undermine the integrity of the entire court process by his attempt to create false evidence in the shape of the three emails, two erroneously altered to appear as if they had been blind copied to the wife, and the third entirely concocted,’ said the judge.
The judge found that just over £2m which came from their mortgage account and was put into Mr Loh-Gronager’s business should be taken as part of his entitlement under the prenup.
Sums totalling £655,000 taken from their joint account and ultimately invested in his business could also not be said to be his separate property and were in fact part of his prenup entitlement, he continued.
Mr Loh-Gronager claimed that £1m which went from his wife’s account to his via the joint account on one day in April 2023 had been a ‘gift’ made by her in a ‘desperate attempt’ to save their marriage.
But the judge said the alleged gift had to be considered in the context of what had been occurring in the couple’s lives in the months preceding it.
Mr Cusworth said that Mr Loh-Gronager claims that while he began a relationship with his current partner in November 2022 it did not become physical until late January 2023.
But he considered it ‘far more likely that their physical relationship began in November 2022, given that they were holidaying in some style together already by the early months of 2023’.
The judge also pointed out that he first sent £5,000 to his mistress on November 27 2022.
‘Whilst I need make no findings about that, it is very clear that by the first weeks of 2023 the husband was engaged in an expensively financed relationship with his new partner, in parallel to his marriage,’ the judge said.
Due to the sums already received and another £375,000 to mark his conduct, including in doctoring emails, the judge reduced the amount Mr Loh-Gronager will receive to £2,369,385.
Mr Justice Cusworth’s judgment in the case was delivered in October, but has only now been made public.
