Christian Schneider at Overlawyered reports a truly mind-boggling result from an English court. A man’s wife left him 30 years ago and they were divorced in 1981. He paid her a settlement then but she later lost the money. She sues her ex-husband to get more money and wins:
British businessman Dennis North’s wife Jean left him 30 years ago after she began seeing another man. Their split became official in 1981, when they signed an agreement that granted Jean their house and income from rents on their various properties.
North went on to be a wildly successful businessman, while his ex-wife never worked. However, a judge has just ordered North to pay Jean a large lump-sum payment because she has “fallen on hard times” due to a number of money-losing investments:
Mr North, 70, has been ordered by a court to hand her another £202,000 (that’s $400,000 US dollars and about 257,000 Euros).
The order follows a series of big-money divorce cases which have swung the law against husbands and resulted in huge payments to ex-wives even after short childless marriages. The North case now threatens to make husbands pay large sums even decades after a split.
http://overlawyered.com/2007/06/large-payment-awarded-after-30-years-of-divorce/
It appears that English courts are now even more hostile to men than even US courts (to be fair, courts in the US vary from state to state; some are harsher toward men than others).
