Ex-oil trader in UK to pay £453 million for divorce

A former London oil and gas trader was ordered to pay his estranged British wife £453 million (41.5 per cent of his wealth) in a divorce settlement. This is one of the biggest settlements in English legal history

The 61-year-old man, who was not named, met his wife, now aged 44, in 1989 in Moscow where she was studying. They married four years later, according to a judgment handed down at London’s High Court on Thursday.

The man, who was born in the Caucasus, earned a fortune in Russia’s energy sector, selling shares in a Russian company he set up for $1.37 billion in 2012.

The woman, originally from eastern Europe who was a housewife throughout the marriage, became a British citizen in 2000 and brought up their two children in Surrey, south of London, where they were educated at private schools before going to university in England.

She said that her estranged husband’s wealth amounted to just over £1 billion and argued that the wealth was “acquired and built up during their long marriage by the parties’ equal contributions to the welfare of the family”, the judgment said.

The man, who has been granted indefinite leave to live in Britain, did not contest the proceedings, for reasons which the judge said were unclear, but had contended that he had made a “special contribution” to the family’s wealth.

The woman, referred to in the judgment as “W”, said she needed a house in London to be near her sons and a villa in the south of France so she could see her sons during their holidays, a maintenance claim which amounted to £224 million. “In the absence of any countervailing evidence, I find that these figures are justified on the evidence before me, given the lifestyle which to which W has become accustomed during her married life and leads,” the judgment said.

“I find that these figures are justified, given the lifestyle which to which W has become accustomed during her married life,” the judgment said.

The previous largest reported divorce settlement in Britain was the $530 million awarded to the estranged wife of hedge fund billionaire Christopher Hohn in 2014.

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Three years earlier, Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky featured in a multi-million pound divorce case. It was reported that his former wife Galinan Besharova had agreed to accept between £165million and £220million as part of a settlement.

In late 2014, Jamie Cooper-Hohn, wife of financier Sir Chris Hohn, was awarded more than £330million. Legal experts said the Cooper-Hohn award was 'certainly' one of the biggest made in the UK.