A city trader who blamed ‘gender prejudice’ after being handed £325,000 of his ex-wife’s £60million family fortune has won a bitter appeal case to have his settlement looked at again.
Simon Entwistle’s three-year marriage to Jenny Helliwell ended in 2022 but he was awarded just 0.5 per cent of her fortune.
He blamed ‘gender prejudice’ for the decision and has won his case at the Court of Appeal in London, meaning his settlement will now be considered again at the High Court.
Appeal judges ruled Jenny had engaged in ‘fraudulent’ behaviour by not declaring almost £48million of her £66million personal fortune whilst making a prenuptial agreement.
The couple had married at a lavish £500,000 wedding in Paris in August 2019 and Mr Entwistle ‘enjoyed the trappings of being married into a family of exceptional wealth,’ it was said.
They were living in a £4.5million villa in Dubai gifted to Ms Helliwell by her father, wealthy Dubai-based British businessman Neil Helliwell. But they split after three years with Ms Helliwell getting lawyers to order her then husband out of the family home with just 48 hours’ notice in August 2022.
The pair, both 42, then went to court over money with Mr Entwistle, originally from Bolton, asking for £2.5million from his interior designer ex-wife’s personal fortune.
Mr Entwistle claimed he required £36,000 a year for flights and £26,000 a year ‘on a meal plan just for himself’ because he admitted: ‘I can’t even cook an omelette’, the court heard.
The judge told him: ‘Being married to a rich person for three years does not suddenly catapult you into a right to live like that after the relationship has ended.’
The ‘painful’ divorce from Ms Helliwell culminated with an award in his favour of £400,000. That sum was reduced to £325,000 after a deduction for Ms Helliwell’s costs when a divorce judge said the three-year marriage did not entitle him to maintain a lavish lifestyle once the relationship ended.
But he was left with a 0.5 per cent share of the pot after the judge upheld a pre-nuptial agreement the pair had signed promising they would each keep their own assets in the event of a split.
Appealing that ruling, Mr Entwistle said he was a victim of ‘gender prejudice’ and that the prenup had been invalidated by Ms Helliwell having failed to disclose assets worth almost £48m – amounting to 73 per cent of her wealth – on documents when he signed it.
Now, Lady Justice King has ruled that the nondisclosure by the heiress amounted to ‘fraudulent’ behaviour which had invalidated the pre-nup.
She allowed Mr Entwistle’s appeal and sent the case back to the divorce courts, ordering it to be recalculated as if the pre-nuptial agreement did not exist.
‘Wilful or fraudulent breach of that agreement such that the disclosure made bears no resemblance to the true wealth of a party…is capable of being material non-disclosure, as it deprives the other party of the information that they have agreed is necessary in order for them to decide whether to agree to a pre-nuptial agreement,’ she said.
‘Since the husband in the instant case was deliberately deprived of information which it had been agreed that he should have, in my judgment, the agreement cannot stand.’
After the original hearing, High Court judge Mr Justice Francis found that the husband’s personal assets were worth around £850,000, including a flat in Salford where he had lived with his first wife before moving to Dubai.
Ms Helliwell, by contrast, was worth around £66m, with her wealthy father having gifted her valuable assets and put some of his business interests in her name.
Helliwell had offered him first £500,000, then £800,000, to avoid a court battle, but he had refused, holding out for £2.5m.
‘The parties went through this painful litigation and the husband is actually worse off now than he would have been if he never brought a claim in the first place, which is tragic for everybody,’ the judge commented.
But he declined to hand the husband any more money, calling his budget of needs ‘aspirational,’ including an ‘astonishing’ claim for £36,000 a year for flights and £26,000 a year ‘on a meal plan just for himself’.
‘He said to me, ‘I can’t even cook an omelette.’ Well, my answer to that is, ‘Learn.’ It is not difficult,’ said the judge.
‘You do not have to be a master chef to learn how to eat reasonably well.’
He added: ‘Being married to a rich person for three years does not suddenly catapult you into a right to live like that after the relationship has ended.’
Given that his own costs were £450,000, the award left Mr Entwistle £125,000 out of pocket – a scenario his barrister argued would not have materialised were their roles reversed.
Challenging the judge’s ruling at the Court of Appeal, Deborah Bangay KC, for Mr Entwistle, said: ‘The judge was warned against gender prejudice, but failed to heed that warning.
‘Had the positions been reversed, it is very unlikely that he would have, so ungenerously assessed the needs of a wife after a six-year relationship.’
She also argued that the pre-nuptial agreement, which had been key to the husband’s low award, was invalidated by Ms Helliwell’s failure to disclose her full wealth, stating that she was worth about £18m rather than her full £66m fortune.
Lady Justice King, giving her ruling, made no finding on the gender prejudice argument but said that in the pre-nup, the wife disclosed £18,206,735 of assets, including multi-million pound property portfolios in Dubai and France.
‘The wife, however, failed to include £47,878,800 of assets owned by her,’ she added.
This included almost £40m worth of business assets, £8m worth of beachfront land in Dubai and a £1,649,000 house in Wimbledon, lived in by her mother.
‘The husband and wife entered into the agreement on the day they married, July 12, 2019,’ she said.
‘Upon divorce, each party would retain their own separate property and split any jointly owned property as to 50 per cent each.
‘At the heart of the dispute is whether the wife’s undoubted failure to disclose the majority of her substantial wealth should have the consequence that the agreement should not be upheld by the court.
‘In the present case, the non-disclosure of the majority of her assets by the wife was undoubtedly deliberate.’
