A 23-year divorce battle believed to be the longest in British legal history has finally come to an end after a High Court judge awarded an ex-wife £6.6million from her former husband’s hidden fortune.
Varsha Gohil, 61, first filed for divorce from solicitor Bhadresh Gohil in May 2002, citing adultery and unreasonable behaviour.
At the time, the north London mother of three accepted a financial settlement worth £270,000 and the family Peugeot, despite harbouring suspicions that her husband had failed to disclose the true extent of his wealth.
More than two decades later, those suspicions have been vindicated after a string of court battles culminating in a ruling that awarded her millions from assets worth around £28million that had been concealed in corporate entities around the world.
The Court of Appeal last month brought the extraordinary legal saga to a close by ruling out any further appeals from either side, allowing a financial judgment handed down by Mr Justice Williams in May last year to be published.
The case has become one of the most significant divorce disputes in modern legal history, helping establish the principle that spouses who conceal assets cannot rely on settlements obtained through dishonesty.
Mrs Gohil had long suspected that her former husband, also now 61, had not been truthful about his finances during the original divorce proceedings.
In 2007 she believed she had gathered sufficient evidence to challenge the original settlement and sought to have it overturned.
Varsha Gohil leaving the Supreme Court in Westminster where they are arguing they should be paid more from divorce settlements because they claim their husbands hid the true extent of their wealth
Her efforts gathered momentum after Bhadresh was exposed as a central figure in a major fraud and money-laundering operation.
The former solicitor, who acted for associates of former Nigerian governor James Ibori, was convicted of multiple money-laundering offences, forgery and conspiracy to defraud before being sentenced to ten years in prison in 2011.
Prosecutors alleged he had helped launder millions through his firm’s client accounts.
The Crown Prosecution Service subsequently froze assets worth approximately £28million that were hidden through a network of companies and entities across the globe.
What followed was a marathon series of legal battles, appeals and counter-appeals that eventually reached the Supreme Court.
In a landmark ruling in 2015, Supreme Court justices ruled that Mrs Gohil was entitled to challenge the original settlement, finding that spouses who fail to provide full and frank disclosure should not benefit from their deception.
The decision was hailed as a watershed moment in family law because previous rulings had often left spouses unable to reopen settlements even after evidence emerged that assets had been concealed.
Despite that victory, the case remained mired in litigation for years due to disputes over ownership of the frozen assets and efforts by authorities to recover them.
When the matter finally came before the High Court in 2023, Mrs Gohil, her former husband and the CPS all advanced competing claims.
Bhadresh argued that the assets were not his and therefore his former wife had no entitlement to them.
The former solicitor Bhadresh Gohil, who acted for associates of former Nigerian governor James Ibori, was convicted of multiple money-laundering offences, forgery and conspiracy to defraud before being sentenced to ten years in prison in 2011
Mrs Gohil maintained that the wealth had belonged to her husband during the marriage and should form part of the matrimonial pot.
Meanwhile, the CPS contended that the entire £28million represented the proceeds of crime and should therefore be subject solely to criminal confiscation proceedings.
Mr Justice Williams rejected key elements of both arguments, concluding that the assets did belong to Bhadresh and that prosecutors had failed to establish that all of the fortune was criminally derived.
The judge found that some of the businesses and assets had been legitimate during the marriage and awarded Mrs Gohil £6.6million from those untainted assets.
In a scathing assessment of the former solicitor, Williams concluded that Bhadresh was ‘thoroughly and pervasively dishonest’ and that ‘his account of being a hard-working, family-orientated and impecunious man who has been ill-used by others and subject to a terrible injustice by the state and by the wife is so very far from the truth that it is hard to comprehend how he can put it forward.
‘The name Gohil will linger long in the memories of lawyers and judges across a range of jurisdictions.
‘Whether, as has been suggested, this is the most extensively litigated “family” dispute in legal history I do not know.’
