Barrister calls for divorce penalties
Non-disclosure has lead to a major increase in costs for their spouses because they have to hire extra professionals to investigate their partners’ financial affairs, Senior Counsel Inge Clissman said.
Not giving full details of assets also makes it virtually impossible to settle some cases and breeds an environment of distrust, Ms Clissman said.
“The courts should send out the message that a spouse engaging in concealment, obfuscation and lack of co-operation will suffer costs and sanctions in terms of property and income,” she said.
As a senior counsel specialising in family law, Ms Clissman has come across several cases here where one spouse has attempted to conceal some of their assets and this has substantially increased costs and the length of court time.
While judges have penalised these spouses by making them foot the bill for all the costs, Ms Clissman believes that tougher measures must be introduced to discourage people from concealing their assets. Two very effective ways of doing this would be to make the spouse who attempts to hide assets to hand over more property or income to their partner, Ms Clissman said.
As the chairperson of the Family Lawyers Association of Ireland, Ms Clissman says the Irish courts could take a lead from the English courts where spouses found guilty of non-disclosure have been severely penalised financially.
In one English case, a husband declared himself bankrupt before his wife’s application for maintenance came in. But it was subsequently discovered that he had failed to declare assets abroad.
He was subsequently ordered to pay his wife’s court costs as well as give her a lump sum payment of £150,000 and £30,000 in reserve.
The Irish Supreme Court has just ruled that the conduct of both parties in a divorce case should only be taken into consideration when it is ‘obvious and gross’.
But Ms Clissman believes this ruling should not only apply to general conduct but also to financial misconduct from now on.
And furthermore, judges must send out the message that in future rulings anyone found attempting to deliberately conceal their assets will have to pay for it substantially in court, she says.
“When this is fully understood and appreciated by practitioners, it will be conveyed to clients and should encourage an environment of frankness and openness,” Ms Clissman said.
There is no official record of the divorce and judicial separation cases where partners have failed to reveal their assets because all these cases are held in-camera and the media is not allowed to report on them.
