Divorcé awarded only £325k of wife’s £60m fortune wins ‘gender bias’ appeal

A City trader who was awarded £325,000 in a divorce from his heiress wife has won an appeal which could land him millions more.

Simon Entwistle, 42, accused High Court judge Mr Justice Francis of ‘gender prejudice’ after receiving just 0.5% of Jenny Helliwell’s £66 million fortune.

The judge ruled to uphold a pre-nuptial agreement which said the couple would keep their own assets if they divorced.

Mr Entwistle argued the prenup was invalid because Ms Helliwell, also 42, failed to disclose nearly £48 million – three-quarters of her wealth – on relevant documents.

Now appeals judge Lady Justice King has ruled Ms Helliwell ‘deliberately deprived’ Mr Entwistle of knowledge of her full wealth, although she did not uphold his gender bias complaint.

Omissions included her ownership of £40m of business assets and £8m worth of beachfront land in Dubai.

She also failed to tell him she was the owner of the £1.6 million house in Wimbledon where her mum was living.

Lady Justice King sent the case back divorce courts, ordering it to be recalculated as though the pre-nup had never existed.

The couple began dating in 2016 and married three years later in a lavish £500,000 ceremony in Paris.

Mr Entwistle ‘enjoyed the trappings of being married into a family of exceptional wealth’, living in a £4.5 million Dubai villa gifted to his wife by her father, businessman Neil Halliwell the court heard.

In the original High Court case, Mr Entwistle applied for a £2.5 million settlement, including a £26,000 annual meal allowance and £36,000 a year for flights.

Mr Justice Francis derided Mr Entwistle, calling his budget of needs ‘astonishing’ and ‘aspirational’ and telling him he should learn to cook.

‘Being married to a rich person for three years does not suddenly catapult you into a right to live like that after the relationship has ended,’ he said.

He found the husband was worth around £850,000, including a flat in Salford, while Ms Helliwell was worth £66 million.

The judge did not conclude that the non-disclosures made the prenup invalid.

Lady Justice King made no finding on whether Mr Entwistle had suffered gender bias but found Mr Justice Francis had ‘erred in law’ on the last point.

She said: ‘At the heart of the dispute is whether the wife’s undoubted failure to disclose the majority of her substantial wealth should have the consequence that the agreement should not be upheld by the court.

‘In the present case, the non-disclosure of the majority of her assets by the wife was undoubtedly deliberate.

‘Given that the wife was aware that the business assets and her mother’s home were in her name, and her evidence was that she made a deliberate decision not to disclose them – albeit, on her case, for reasons connected to tax – it is in my judgment inescapable that her decision not to disclose those assets was fraudulent.

‘The deliberate non-disclosure falsified and made untrue the wife’s express representation to the husband at recital of the [pre-nup] agreement that she had made full and frank disclosure of her financial resources.

‘It was also clear from the terms of the agreement itself that the statements…were intended to induce the husband to enter into the agreement.

‘In my judgment, the judge erred in law in concluding that on the facts of the case, the wife’s deliberate non-disclosure, on current figures, of some 73% of her wealth did not serve to vitiate the agreement.’

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