Father transferred property to his sister in deliberate attempt to avoid paying child maintenance
A father has been found to have deliberately transferred a property to his sister in an attempt to prevent the mother from having the property sold to pay unpaid child maintenance.
In July last year the father was ordered to pay to the mother some £134,000, representing capitalised child maintenance for their three children. The father failed to pay, and the mother therefore obtained a charging order over the property, the husband’s only asset in this jurisdiction (he lives in the middle east, in a country where English family law orders cannot be enforced).
The charging order enabled the mother to seek an order for sale of the property, so that the proceeds could be used to pay the unpaid child maintenance.
However, the husband claimed that the month before the charging order was made, he transferred the property to his sister, thereby putting it out of reach of the mother.
The mother in turn claimed that the transfer was a sham, intended solely to prevent her from enforcing the maintenance order. She therefore asked the court to have the transfer set aside.
Hearing the case, Deputy District Judge Hodson made the following notable comment:
“It is a tragic fact across world history that in the context of domestic relationships where there are dishonest and deceitful men, the victims often having to fight it out are 2 women. As it is here between the former wife and her former husband’s sister with the former husband effectively sitting back, protected by being in Country B, a country in the Middle East and without any reciprocal family law arrangements with the UK, and having divested himself of all English-based assets. In reality I had to decide between them. In fact it was even more unattractive. The former wife was pursuing child maintenance and therefore in reality it was his 3 daughters against his sister, their aunt. How exceedingly unattractive for a man to create and allow this situation, which he has.”
He went on to say that the father was a wholly unreliable witness, who had “deliberately taken steps to make sure that his daughters have, during the later years of their minority, no opportunity of being financially supported by him by his disposing all his assets from the jurisdiction and putting himself beyond practical enforcement measures.”
The father tried to claim that the transfer to his sister was genuine, and not made simply to avoid payment of the maintenance. If that were the case, then the court could not set the transfer aside.
But DDJ Hodson found that there was (unusually, for this type of case) very clear evidence that the father had made the transfer with the sole aim of preventing the mother from enforcing the maintenance order. And the husband’s suggestion that the sister had somehow given consideration for the transfer (thereby showing that it was not a sham) was not proved.
Accordingly, DDJ Hodson made an order setting aside the transfer, although he suspended the order, so as to give the father an opportunity to raise the funds to pay the outstanding child maintenance.
You can read the full report of the case here.
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