Every divorce is unique. But very few cases are quite as extraordinary as the divorce of James Morgan Copinger-Symes and his now ex-wife, Maria-Christina, a former manager of the band INXS. The couple, who married in 1998, had four children and lived in a multimillion-pound townhouse in Chelsea. In a recent judgment handed down in the Central Family Court, His Honour Judge Edward Hess presided over a highly unusual and remarkable dispute involving the Copinger-Symes’ divorce settlement, which was finalised in 2022.
Spanning multiple jurisdictions and involving significant sums, the case featured many distinctive elements - not least that the wife’s (De La Sala) family had favoured their son-in-law rather than their own daughter by secretly gifting him more than £27m. As a result, the wife successfully overturned the divorce agreement with her former husband.
The complex narrative can be summarised as follows.
When their marriage broke down in 2017, the Australian-based De La Sala family, which has a substantial shipping empire, sided with the husband rather than their daughter, the wife: he received a fortune from them while she was cut out. In his judgment charting the family’s protracted history of financial disputes, Hess described it as ‘an exception to the normal rule that “blood is thicker than water”’.
After the couple married, they both worked for her family’s business. In their divorce settlement, they agreed to a court order under which she would keep between £2.4m and £5m from their combined fortune. The bracket was in part because of uncertainty about whether a loan from her parents would be called in. The wife was to pay her ex-husband a lump sum of £850,000 and cover their children’s school fees.
When she did not pay, he initiated legal action during which it emerged that he had recently been gifted £27.6m by his ex-wife’s parents shortly after the divorce.
‘He was, all of a sudden, a very wealthy man,’ noted HHJ Hess. ‘Perhaps it should not have done, but this information came as a horrible shock to the wife and it prompted a good deal of activity from her lawyers.’ The wife filed an application to have the previous financial remedies order set aside, requesting £14m of her husband’s wealth. This litigation also involved her mother, Ms. Terrill De La Sala, as an intervenor. Hess overturned the financial order and said that the couple’s financial situation should be reconsidered.
The De La Sala dynasty appears to have a history of discord and disputes, set out in detail by HHJ Hess. Once her father’s favourite, Ms Copinger-Symes never spoke to him again after separating from her husband and was excluded from his funeral in 2022. The feud was partly caused by the separation. But other factors were also in play, including a legal dispute over the Chelsea townhouse, during which the police intervened, and a row about her use of a £250,000 gift from her parents.
In 2017, her parents ended ‘all financial and emotional support’, signing statutory declarations explaining why their daughter was excluded from their wills. One such reason, as highlighted by HHJ Hess in his judgment, was offering support to her uncle in a legal dispute over the family fortune, in return for payment. In 2018, her father wrote: ‘This is your ultimate betrayal of the whole family and utter hypocrisy on your part.’ Thereafter, she was referred to as ‘Judas’ by the family ‘as a mark of her betrayal’.
Her father won the dispute with his brother, securing more than £300m. Meanwhile, the husband benefited. Hess said: ‘For all practical purposes he had completely taken over and subsumed her (the daughter’s) position as a member of the De La Sala family.’
Ruling in favour of his wife on the grounds of ‘material non-disclosure’, HHJ Hess said that the evidence suggested that the husband must have known the gift was due when the divorce settlement was signed. Hess said he did not believe De La Sala family statements that the gift was linked to their son-in-law’s cancer diagnosis, believing this was concocted to undermine their daughter’s case.
On any view, the history of the case and the family history before it is quite extraordinary – and perhaps unprecedented because of the unique factor that the De La Sala family favoured so strongly their son-in-law and not their once favoured and now excluded daughter.
It is also a timely reminder that disclosure obligations do not end at Form E, replies to questionnaire or even an agreement being reached, and of the principles of failure of basis and mistake, both of which were run by the wife’s mother unsuccessfully.
Furthermore, the ‘failure of basis’ argument attempts to turn the point on its head. It claims that since the money was set aside, it should now be returned to the wife’s mother because the husband would never have received it in the first place if the wife’s mother had known that she might be entitled to a share of it.
Despite the lengths taken by the De La Sala family to defend against any applications from the wife, the extent to which it might ultimately matter could be small, relative to the figures involved, particularly given the court’s indication that the gift to her former husband is unlikely to be considered matrimonial, and therefore available for sharing with his former spouse.
It will be interesting to see the outcome when the couple’s financial situation is reconsidered.
Kate Brett is a partner at Hughes Fowler Carruthers, London
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