A deputy High Court judge has handed down a judgment enforcing the terms of a pre-nuptial agreement in a case where the wife removed the signed copy of the agreement from the husband’s study and denied its existence.
His Honour Judge Edward Hess delivered the judgment in IC v AD [2026] EWFC 224 following a five-day hearing in the Central Family Court, broadly enforcing the terms of the pre-nup with some additional entitlement for the wife.
A pre-nuptial agreement was signed some seven weeks or so before the marriage took place in February 2012.
The couple, both in their early 40s, were married for 14 years, have two pre-teen children together, and live in North London. The husband works as a head of investor relations at an investment equity finance business, with earnings of approximately £1.5 million a year.
The wife, having formerly worked as a beauty therapist, was a homemaker for much of their marriage, but is currently studying for a degree in marketing and AI at a London university, and reasonably expects to be able to earn £23,000-£27,000 a year after she graduates in 2027.
Under the terms of the disputed prenuptial agreement, the wife would be entitled to £2,837,691, in addition to the use of the husband’s share of the family home on Mesher terms, until their youngest child leaves education in 2037. She would also be entitled to make a claim for spousal periodical payments and child periodical payments until 2037.
The above would leave the husband with a remaining £23,793,964 in assets.
The cost of their divorce has so far run into more than £1 million, with the wife incurring £362,750 in legal costs and the husband a total of £674,372.
Following the hearing, Judge Hess reasoned that the wife would be entitled to an additional £1 million in spousal payments, split into £13,000 chunks, but enforced the terms of the pre-nup to leave her with a total of £3,134,441 and an additional £703,250 (the value of the half share in the family home, plus the right to live there until 2037).
Judge Hess said: “As the marriage broke down, the wife believed and feared that the pre-nuptial agreement would be disadvantageous to her financial remedies case and the husband believed and hoped that the pre-nuptial agreement would be advantageous to his financial remedies case.
“I am persuaded on a balance of probabilities that the wife did, as the marriage broke down, remove the signed copy of the pre-nuptial agreement from the paper file in which the husband had carefully retained it in his study and hoped that, by doing this, the husband would not be able to establish the existence of a signed pre-nuptial agreement. In fact, the husband was able to do this by spending some time investigating contemporaneous email accounts and, in the end, the wife had to make the concession.”
Unsigned copies of the pre-nup were obtained, but Hess described the contents as “a piece of sub-optimal drafting” and “not a model of clarity”, leading to disputes over the various meanings.
Judge Hess said that after it was raised by the husband in 2024, the wife did not immediately accept the existence of a signed pre-nuptial agreement and “for a considerable period she declined to commit herself to the proposition that there had ever been a signed pre-nuptial agreement”.
He wrote: “I am persuaded on a balance of probabilities that she was perfectly well aware that there had been a signed pre-nuptial agreement and her non-commitment to the proposition was strategic.”
Court documents show the couple had total realisable assets of £8,576,216.
The husband has more than £18 million in a non-realisable pension, and the wife a £32,500 self-invested pension pot.
