Court of Appeal Hands Down Latest Judgement In Goddard-Watts v Goddard-Watts Case

Today the Court of Appeal has given judgment in favour of Mrs Goddard-Watts in a case concerning the deliberate and repeated non-disclosure of assets by her former husband.

National Head of Family Law at Irwin Mitchell, Ros Bever successfully represented Mrs Goddard-Watts in the Court of Appeal alongside a team including Lara Tucker, senior associate solicitor in Sheffield.

In what is an unusual and long-running case, Mr and Mrs Goddard-Watts lived together from 1987, married in 1996 and had three sons together. They divorced in 2010 and agreed the division of the family assets in a consent order, where both parties agree. As part of the settlement, the husband retained his business interest and the wife kept the family home.

It later emerged that the husband had failed to disclose trust assets which the court found in 2015 to be a material non-disclosure and so the order was set aside. The court reconsidered the case and awarded the wife additional funds to account for the non-disclosure. However the husband had yet again failed to disclose important information regarding the potential sale of his business which led to a sale of shares worth £25m and potentially a further £75m. Consequently, the second award was set aside in 2020 and yet a further hearing was scheduled to determine a fair division of the assets in 2022.

At that hearing, the judge took the view that he was not going to start from scratch in deciding how the assets should be divided, and took a more limited approach pursuant to a case called Kingdon v Kingdon 2011. This meant that he restricted his consideration only to the non-disclosed assets, leaving the rest of the award as it was, and he made an additional award based on his assessment of the wife’s needs, rather than starting with a clean sheet.

Mrs Goddard-Watts challenged this approach on appeal and the Court of Appeal agreed with her. In her judgment, Lady Justice Macur (with whom the other judges agreed) found that in cases of non-disclosure the court retains a flexibility to adapt its approach to the individual case and it may be right to take the approach in Kingdon in some circumstances. However, she noted that in Kingdon itself that approach had been appropriate because it was the non-disclosing husband who had sought to benefit from his own fraud by setting aside the whole order to his own advantage. In that case the restrictive approach protected the wife.

The Court found that the judge was wrong to adopt the Kingdon approach in Mrs Goddard-Watts’ case because it could not be confined to a single issue. One reason for this was the additional contribution that Mrs Goddard-Watts had made to the welfare of the family and supporting the children who were all estranged from their father.

The Court also found that the husband’s fraud meant it would be wholly unjust to disregard pursuant to s25(2)(g) of the Matrimonial Causes Act (conduct), and although this might not lead to a direct monetary evaluation, “it provides ‘the glass’ through which to address the unnecessary delay in achieving finality of the wife’s overall claim, including her unanticipated contribution to the welfare of the family post 2010.”

The Court therefore held that Mr Goddard-Watts’ fraudulent non-disclosure was so far reaching (especially in light of his earlier non-disclosure) that it required the judge to reconsider the entire financial landscape.. The delay in finalising the case was caused entirely by the husband’s fraud and the wife was entitled to have her application reconsidered completely and in real-time.

Expert Opinion

Ros Bever, National Head of Family Law “Mrs Goddard Watts has been forced to fight for 13 years for the right to a fair hearing of her case where all of the relevant financial information is available to the court. The repeated non-disclosure by Mr Goddard-Watts has prevented that. We are pleased with the Court of Appeal’s decision that the Judge was wrong to limit himself in his approach.

“It would have been unjust and would send entirely the wrong message to allow Mr Goddard-Watts to profit in light of his deliberate failure to disclose. For justice to be done the court has to look at the complete picture and Mrs Goddard-Watts deserves and is entitled to that.

“Unfortunately, this is not yet over and Mrs Goddard-Watts is disappointed that the Court of Appeal did not feel able to make a decision on how to settle the case financially. The family court will now have to consider the case again to decide on an appropriate division of the assets and it is only fair that Mrs Goddard-Watts should be able to have the case properly heard with thorough consideration of the totality of the assets starting with a blank page.”