Don’t do it! Or at least don’t do it unless you have first taken expert advice from a specialist family and divorce lawyer. This is complex.
Now, somebody reading this might be thinking ‘typical lawyers – trying to help people hide assets from their spouse’. No! That is not what I am saying – if you transfer money or assets away with the intention of defeating your spouse’s claims in a divorce, then chances are your spouse and the Courts will see through that!
But it has to be recognised that a divorce could come at any time of your life and could clash with anything else going on at that particular time. You might always have intended to give your child a 50% stake in your company when they reached 25 or you might have been holding on to savings for someone else and need to return it, or countless other scenarios.
Such transfers/transactions could look suspicious in the light of the impending divorce and the Court does have power to set aside such transfers or ‘add back in’ the value of the asset in the divorce, when considering what provision to make for spouses on divorce. If you take advice first, we can tell you how we think a Court will view the transaction and the extent to which it would investigate it. We can also guide you as to how to proceed, if you are going to, to protect yourself against arguments of wrongdoing.
For more information on the issues raised in this blog please do not hesitate to contact one of the team at Rayden Solicitors.
