Back in March, I wrote a blog about Helliwell v Entwistle, where a husband who was told that he needed to learn how to cook by the judge when he argued to the court that it shouldn’t uphold a pre-nuptial agreement that gave him nothing from his wife’s £66 million fortune. The judge, Mr Justice Francis, awarded him a lump sum of £400,000, but this was entirely eroded by the legal fees that he had incurred with his solicitors and the costs that he was ordered to pay to his wife.
The husband appealed to the Court of Appeal – and he was successful. The judgment can found here.
His appeal was on the following grounds:
- The judge should have found the wife knowingly to have made a false and material non-disclosure. Her misrepresentation of her wealth was a vitiating factor particularly in circumstances of the husband having received only preliminary legal advice;
- The judge was wrong to have upheld an agreement which was signed only on the day of the wedding;
- The husband had been placed under undue pressure to sign the agreement;
- The wife was in breach of paragraph 32 of the agreement having failed to mediate following the breakdown of the marriage;
- The judge failed was adequately to provide for the husband’s needs in that the provision for housing inadequate;
- The judge had been guilty of gender discrimination in that the needs provision made by the judge for the husband was substantially less than the provision which would have been made to a wife in similar circumstances.
The media reports about this case in The Times, the Daily Telegraph and Metro contain headlines that indicate that his appeal was successful due to gender bias, but this isn’t the case. The judgment of Lady Justice King overturned the decision of Mr Justice Francis on the first ground – material non-disclosure. The Court of Appeal pretty much ignored the gender bias argument. To be fair the media articles don’t give the impression that gender bias made any difference. Indeed, Metro states that the court made no finding on that point. I understand that journalists often don’t have much control over the headlines for their articles. Headlines are the responsibility of the subeditors who I can’t help but note tend to focus on the juicy stuff (e.g. being told by a judge to learn how to cook).
The Court of Appeal granted the appeal on the basis that the judge had erred when he failed to take into account the wife’s misleading description of her financial circumstances in the pre-nuptial agreement. The parties had agreed to provide disclosure of their financial circumstances in appendices to the agreement, but the wife only disclosed about a third of her £66 million fortune. This proved fatal to her argument that the pre-nup should be upheld.
In a divorce or dissolution of a civil partnership, both parties are under an obligation to provide each other with full disclosure of each other’s financial circumstances, often with supporting documentary evidence. When the court considers making a financial consent order reflecting the terms of any agreement, the parties must provide the court with a D81 statement setting out a summary of the parties’ current financial circumstances and what they will be after implementation of the agreement. If one party materially misleads another party about their finances, then this may be grounds for the misled party to apply to set aside the financial order.
The appeal in Helliwell v Entwistle focussed on whether the parties were under a similar obligation when entering into a pre-nuptial agreement. Normal practice when drafting pre-nuptial agreements is to include a schedule or appendix to the agreement, in which the parties set out a summary of their income, assets and liabilities. It is rare when drafting pre-nups to provide supporting documentary evidence, unlike divorce and dissolutions where it is commonplace. In fact, it is rare in my experience for there to be any negotiations between solicitors about pre-nups; the couple usually agree the terms direct, rather than the solicitors being involved. The solicitors’ role is to give the parties legal advice about whether they should commit to the agreement, and to then draft the agreement and to sign a certificate confirming that the party has received legal advice about it.
In Radmacher v Granatino, the 2010 Supreme Court case which firmly established the position of pre-nups in law as something which the court should usually take into account, the agreement , somewhat unusually, did not contain a summary of the parties’ finances. That agreement was upheld and Mr Granatino received nothing.
However in Helliwell v Entwistle, the agreement contained such a summary and the parties had agreed in the agreement that they would provide disclosure of their finances. Therefore, the Court of Appeal distinguished the case from Radmacher. As the parties had agreed to provide financial disclosure, the failure by the wife to provide that disclosure correctly rendered the agreement null and void. The husband had been deliberately deprived of information that it had been agreed he should have.
The case has therefore been referred back to the Family Court for it to decide how the parties’ assets should be divided between them. However, this does not necessarily mean that Mr Entwistle is guaranteed a massive pay out.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Standish v Standish that non-matrimonial assets were not subject to the sharing principle may prove to be a significant problem for the husband. Matrimonial assets are shared between the parties, but non-matrimonial assets are not. The vast bulk of the wife’s assets in Helliwell v Entwistle were apparently provided by her father. They sound distinctly non-matrimonial in nature.
The court can still award one party a share of the non-matrimonial assets owned by the other in order to meet their needs. However, it is worth noting that this was not a particularly long marriage (including pre-marital cohabiting, it was only about 6 or 7 years) and the parties had no children. Both are young and able to work. The husband has some assets in his name already, amounting to £850,000, which are available to meet his needs.
We will have to see what the Family Court does. I suspect he will get more than the £400,000 awarded first time around, but whether he will get the £2.4 million he was seeking remains to be seen. It may settle, and if so we will probably never find out what he gets.
The Court of Appeal did not comment on whether he should still learn how to cook.
2 August 2025
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