Multi-millionaire banker turned sheep farmer who gave then-wife £80MILLION in bid to avoid inheritance tax only to SPLIT from her battles her in court to get a huge slice of the cash back

A multi-millionaire banker turned sheep farmer is locked in a divorce battle together with his ex-wife over the £132million household fortune – after handing her £80m throughout a failed tax avoidance bid.

Clive Standish, 70, former CFO of UBS and Australian sheep-farming tycoon, married Anna Standish, 55, in December 2005, however the couple separated in 2020 after a 15-year marriage throughout which they’d two youngsters.

The marital belongings on the time of the cut up had been an infinite £132million, nearly all of which had grown from the £57.3million fortune that Mr Standish introduced into the wedding.

Mr Standish retired in 2007, dwelling off the income of a £28million sheep farm down underneath, whereas the couple loved life in 18-bedroom mansion Moundsmere Manor, set in 83 acres close to the Hampshire village of Preston Candover, on the location of an authentic manor as soon as owned by Henry VIII.

In 2016 HMRC introduced adjustments to the inheritance tax regime, which Mr Standish feared would see his private belongings uncovered to a 40 per cent tax levy upon his demise.

In consequence, he transferred £80million value of belongings to his spouse, with a plan being put in place for them to ultimately be positioned in a offshore belief for the advantage of their youngsters.

However the marriage hit the rocks earlier than that would occur, leaving the couple estranged and Mrs Standish claiming the £80m was hers outright, having been ‘gifted’ to her.

In December final yr the couple clashed within the divorce courts with Mr Justice Moor ruling that the husband ought to get £87.6million of the entire household wealth of £132,648,326, with the spouse to stroll away with £45million.

Now each husband and spouse are combating towards that ruling within the Attraction Court docket.

Legal professionals for the husband say the spouse ought to have solely acquired round £25million, claiming the division was unfair as he introduced practically all of the wealth into the wedding and had by no means supposed the £80million to be a ‘present’ to his spouse.

However attorneys for the spouse need to up her share to round £56.3million, claiming that to provide her much less could be ‘discrimination’.

Tim Bishop KC, for the husband, informed Woman Justice King, Lord Justice Moylan and Lord Justice Phillips that the husband had ‘a really profitable profession in banking.’

‘Consequently he acquired substantial wealth within the type of money investments and property, together with a big farm in Australia known as Ardenside,’ he mentioned.

He informed the judges that in June 2004 the husband was value £57.3million, while the spouse ‘has no important pre-martial wealth’.

Mr Standish is British, however moved to Australia in 1976 earlier than shifting again to England together with his household in 2010.

This example left him open to a doubtlessly large inheritance tax hit when potential adjustments had been introduced in 2016 affecting anybody with a British domicile of origin returning to the UK from a rustic they’d made their new everlasting house.

Within the face of this, he ‘commenced a course of to protect his property from IHT’ by ‘transferring his belongings to the spouse to carry for a interval and for the spouse then to settle the transferred belongings right into a belief’.

‘The husband made the transfers in March 2017, however the spouse didn’t switch the belongings into belief by the point the wedding bumped into issues in 2019 after which broke down lastly in 2020,’ the barrister mentioned.

Slamming the divorce choose’s eventual division of the belongings as ‘unfair,’ the husband’s barrister argued it had been unsuitable for the £80m to have been thought to be having develop into ‘matrimonialised’ property, moderately than the non-public property of the husband and never to enter the pot for division.

‘The choose confused the evaluation of what had occurred to the title of the belongings with the project of whether or not it was truthful to deal with them as matrimonial,’ he argued, happening to induce the court docket to chop the spouse’s share to between £25million and £29million.

Richard Todd KC, for the spouse, nonetheless argued that the spouse ought to have gotten much more than she did.

‘The husband is emphatic in asserting that this case is all about him bringing the lion’s share of the capital into the wedding,’ he mentioned.

‘He writes off his absolute present to the spouse as one thing of no actual consequence.

‘All property has an proprietor. Till 1882, married ladies discovered it extraordinarily tough if not not possible to personal property.

‘The idea that items made outright to a partner are of a lesser high quality than items made to anybody else is patrician, outmoded and – as a lot of the recipients are prone to be wives – illegal discrimination.

‘But that’s the gravamen of the husband’s case: a present made to a partner is totally retrievable and solely as a result of the events are married.

‘It’s solely due to her standing of spouse that Mrs Standish stands to lose what was transferred to her in an unimpeached and accomplished present.

‘What occurred right here is evident. The husband gifted his separate property to the spouse. It then turned her separate property to do with as she preferred.

‘Thereafter, she unilaterally determined that her cash needs to be handled as a part of the equal partnership matrimonial property.’

He argued that the £80m that was the spouse’s property by proper and all the pieces else aside from the sheep farm should be equally cut up, leaving every of the previous spouses with £56.3million.

The listening to, at which the spouse is represented by celeb divorce lawyer Fiona Shackleton, continues.