Michael Prest, a Multi-millionaire African oil tycoon used the African Itsekiri law to attempt an strip his ex-wife of a £17.5million divorce payout has won a landmark case to slash the money by £9million.
Despite being slammed for his ‘ingenious and dishonest’ attempts to conceal his huge wealth from the divorce courts, he has won his marathon legal fight.
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One of the country’s top family judges said that ‘there were almost no lengths to which he was not prepared to go’ in his fight to cut down his 49-year-old ex-wife Yasmin’s divorce settlement.
Although she insisted he was worth ‘tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds’ and asked for an award of £30.4 million, he was adamant he was worse than penniless, with net debts of £48 million, and said his ex was entitled to only just over £2 million.
After a marathon dispute that ran up ‘astronomical’ legal costs of more than £3 million – and during which Mr Prest ‘repeatedly flouted’ his duty to fully and frankly disclose his assets – he was last year ordered to give his ex-wife money and assets worth £17.5 million.
However, in a ruling today that award was cut by up to £9 million by the Court of Appeal.
In a majority decision – which exposed a gaping rift between family and commercial lawyers – the court ruled the divorce judge had been wrong to ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and award Mrs Prest six London properties owned by companies that her ex-husband was said to control.
The highly educated couple married in 1993 and had four children.
Mr Prest, who was named as one of the three most influential black men in Britain in 2007, was also ordered to pay maintenance of £24,000-a-year for each of his four children, along with their private school fees and medical bills.
Lawyers for the three companies that bought the appeal insisted that their assets did not belong to Mr Prest but are ‘held in trust’ for his children and the children of his four siblings in Africa, under Nigerian Itsekiri customary law.
Mr Prest, the court heard, received a gift of £10,000 ‘seed money’ from his Nigerian father before he died in 1992, and he used that cash as the foundation stone on which he built his oil and property empire.
Under customary law in Nigeria, his father’s death left Mr Prest as head of his family, with a responsibility to use his late father’s money to look after his siblings and their children, his legal team argued.
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