Civil Way: 11 April 2008

RISKY BUSINESS

By a consent order, the (former) husband capitalised the periodical payments of the (former) wife at £125,000 in return for a clean break and around six months later the wife remarried. In the wife’s statement of information with the draft consent order, she had declared that she had no intention to marry or cohabit “at present”. This was also her stance in pre-order correspondence between solicitors.

The husband’s attempt at “Doing a Barder” (see Barder v Barder [1987] 2 All ER 440 and 157 NLJ 1748, p 1,764) came a cropper in the Court of Appeal in Dixon v Marchant [2008] EWCA Civ 11, [2008] All ER (D) 160 (Jan) by a majority. Unfortunately for the husband, when he made his first offer to capitalise at £75,000 it was in issue whether or not the wife was then cohabiting with the man she came to marry.

Now, not never ever

Lord Justice Ward (giving