Philip Perrins and Beth Hibbert, instructed by Claudette Gikes of GN Law, acted for the applicant wife in the case of Mahtani v Mahtani (No. 2), the financial application following the court’s earlier decision Mahtani v Mahtani [2023] EWHC 2988 (Fam) refusing to recognise the Indonesian divorce surreptitiously obtained by the respondent husband.  The husband is from a wealthy and prominent family in Indonesia and is believed by the wife to have assets of over £100m, but he failed to engage with the proceedings or did not provide any financial disclosure.

Deputy High Court Judge James Ewins KC considered the law on non-disclosure / non-engagement and what adverse inferences he could properly draw from all the available material, including what had been disclosed, judicial experience of what is likely to be being concealed and the inherent probabilities, in deciding what the facts were.  He concluded that the husband had property assets of c.£27.8m to which the wife had a sharing claim and the balance of his other, including corporate, financial resources were sufficient that the highest award sought by the wife represented an outcome that was not unfair to him.  He ordered the husband to pay the wife a lump sum of £13.9m, which exceeded her needs-based claims which he assessed at between £6.8-7.4m.   

The judge made a worldwide freezing injunction pending implementation of the substantive financial remedies order and on the basis that there remained a real risk of the order going unsatisfied if such an order was not made. 

The husband was ordered to pay the wife’s costs on an indemnity basis, given that the extent of the husband’s litigation conduct merited the strongest censure in terms of costs.