Pre-nup ruling will shake up divorce law
THE DAYS of lucrative divorce settlements in the UK could be drawing to a close, after a London appeal court ruled yesterday that a pre-nuptial agreement between a wealthy German heiress and her husband was legally binding.
Lord Justice Mathew Thorpe handed down a landmark ruling which determined that a contract between heiress Katrin Radmacher and her French spouse Nicolas Granatino, signed prior to their UK marriage in 1998, should be considered in their divorce.
Granatino had initially been awarded a divorce settlement worth some £5.8m but the Court of Appeal ruled that he should be given a one-off lump sum of £1m, plus a £2.5m loan for a home that must be returned when the couple’s two daughters reach adulthood.
The initial ruling had deemed the contract “manifestly unfair” to Grantino, an investment banker who quit his job to begin a postgraduate degree at Oxford University.
Radmacher, a paper industry heiress and one of Germany’s richest women, worth in the region of £100m, had Granatino sign a pre-nuptial contract before they married.
Justice Thorpe said that future cases of a similar nature should give “due weight” to such contracts before finalising division of assets, adding that the pre-nuptial had been “freely and knowingly agreed”.
He said a decision to disregard pre-nuptials would not “sufficiently recognise the rights of autonomous adults to govern their future financial relationship by agreement”.
Granatino is understood to be considering whether or not to take the case all the way to the House of Lords, the UK’s highest court. Radmacher, 39, said she was “delighted”.
The case represents a watershed moment for divorce law, because pre-nuptial agreements have never before been considered legally binding in the UK.
The English legal system has until now been seen as the softest in the world for divorce settlements, because it awarded such hefty payouts to divorcees.