DIVORCED COUPLE SPEND £1.5m DECIDING WHERE THE BATTLE FOR THEIR FORTUNE WILL BE HELD
A divorced couple fighting over an estimated £135 million fortune have spent £1.5 million on lawyers just to decide where the case should be heard.
Judges threw out entrepreneur Jim Moore's appeal last month against a High Court ruling that it should take place in Britain. Yesterday, they described the battle over the location of the case as a "lamentable and grotesque waste of family resources".
Kim Moore, his 44-year-old former wife, has already turned down an offer of £6 million plus a portfolio of properties in Spain.
Mr Moore, 46, who made his fortune from property development, claims the figure would cover her financial needs and allow her to continue her current standard of living. He says that she already gets £150,000 a year from other sources.
After she rejected the offer, the entrepreneur, who lives in Marbella, had wanted the financial settlement to be heard in Spain, where he would expect to pay a lot less. But his former wife wanted it in Britain following House of Lords rulings benefiting wives.
Last month, Mr Moore lost an appeal to stop it going ahead in the UK. Lord Justice Thorpe sitting with Lord Justice Lawrence Collins and Mr Justice Munby made up their minds without hearing Mrs Moore's QC, and after being told legal costs in the UK and Spain were £1.5 million on both sides.
Yesterday, in written reasons for their decision, Lord Justice Thorpe said that while the parties were "seemingly very rich", it was extraordinary that they had spent so much to decide where the proceedings would be.
He added: "We do not know whether this lamentable and grotesque waste of family resources is the result of the intransigence of one or other of the parties or because the husband hopes, or has been advised, that the Spanish court . . . will mis-apply English law to his benefit."
The couple, who married in 1998 and have three children aged seven to 16, divorced in March last year. But Mrs Moore, of Thames Ditton, Surrey, claimed the settlement offered at the time by her husband, the founder of Inside Track, a property investment service, was not enough.
Mr Moore's spokesman said: "Mr Moore is obviously disappointed the Appeal Court has decided as it did. But nevertheless he looks forward to the issues being finally resolved in the interests of all the members of his family."
+ News Source: TELEGRAPH
+ Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/21/nsplit21.xml
+ Last Updated: 2007-04-21 12:10:56
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