With thanks to the Television Education Network, today’s post considers the above mentioned topic in a ‘vidcast’.
As usual, an edited transcript of the presentation is below -
Bonnici v Bonnici was a family law case involving a 20-year marriage, where there was an inheritance received by the husband about six months prior to the separation.
The couple were together for 20 years, 19.5 years in, the husband receives a significant inheritance in his personal name and six months later he separated from his wife.
The wife argued that that inheritance that he received should be included in the pool of matrimonial assets available for division between the two of them.
The husband tried to argue the inheritance should be a financial resource only, because it was an amount that he received from his parents and wasn’t an amount that he and his wife had built up during the relationship.
The court held that an inheritance is not protected from family law proceedings just because it is an inheritance.
They said there might be instances where an inheritance is protected and is not available as a matrimonial property, but there would need to be some exceptional circumstances in order for that to be the case.
Therefore in Bonnici, that entire inheritance was included in the matrimonial pool, subject to the parties then making submissions about their respective contributions.
One of the factors which was relevant in Bonnici was that the wife argued (and the Court accepted) that she had actually contributed to the value of the wealth that was inherited by the husband, because the husband and wife had been actively involved in a restaurant business owned by the parents and she had made contributions to the success of that business for remuneration which was less than market value.
Her argument was that she had done unpaid work in the business and had also had homemaking duties while her husband contributed to the business.
One of the factors that the court considered when deciding that inheritance was matrimonial property was the fact that the wife had contributed to the overall value of the parents’ estate that passed to the husband and as a result, the inheritance was exposed in the family law proceedings.
** For the trainspotters, ‘storing up inheritance’ is a line from the Johnny Cash song ‘What is Man’.