A trader is appealing for a greater share of his wife’s £61.5 million fortune after lawyers in a bitter divorce row claimed a woman would have been treated differently.
Simon Entwistle’s ‘painful’ divorce from heiress Jenny Helliwell culminated with an award in his favour of just £400,000, £2.1 million less than he had originally claimed.
That sum was reduced to £325,000 after a deduction for Ms Helliwell’s costs after a divorce judge said the three-year marriage did not entitle him to maintain a lavish lifestyle once the relationship ended.
Given that his own costs were £450,000, the award left Mr Entwistle £125,000 out of pocket – a scenario that his barrister has now argued would not have materialised were their roles reversed.
‘The judge was warned against gender prejudice, but failed to heed that warning,’ said Deborah Bangay KC, challenging the original ruling at the court of appeal in London.
‘Had the positions been reversed, it is very unlikely that he would have… so ungenerously assessed the needs of a wife after a six-year relationship.’
She also accused the wife of using ‘unconscionable pressure…and exploitation of a dominant position’ in getting the husband to sign a pre-nuptial agreement protecting her millions, ‘brought about at the instigation of the wife and signed on the day of the wedding.’
The silk argued that Ms Helliwell had rendered the pre-nuptial agreement void by refusing ‘to entertain any form of mediation’.
Jenny Helliwell, the 43-year-old daughter of a wealthy Dubai-based businessman, is estimated to be worth £61.5 million. Her former husband was awarded £400,000 in divorce proceedings
Simon Entwistle’s ‘painful’ divorce from Ms Helliwell culminated with an award in his favour of £400,000, £2.1 million less than he had originally claimed
Lawyers for Mr Entwistle have now lodged an appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice in London claiming that he has been a victim of gender prejudice
‘Instead of mediation, the wife issued threats of the utmost gravity to force the husband’s removal from the family home by the Dubai authorities if he did not vacate,’ she said.
She added that Ms Helliwell’s initial financial disclosure of £23m in assets ‘was grossly deficient’, representing only about a third of her true net worth, and argued that the judge had erred in failing to take ‘admitted breaches of disclosure and the pre-nuptial agreement’ into account when making the award.
Lawyers for Ms Helliwell, who originally offered her former husband an out-of-court settlement of first £500,000 and then £800,000, have argued that high court judge had in fact been ‘generous to him’.
Explaining his decision not to award the full £2.5 million claimed by Mr Entwistle at the time, Mr Justice Francis acknowledged that the husband would be left out of pocket.
‘The parties went through this painful litigation and the husband is actually worse off now than he would have been if he never brought a claim in the first place, which is tragic for everybody,’ said the judge.
He nonetheless declined to increase the award, branding Mr Entwistle’s professed needs ‘aspirational’. Those needs included an ‘astonishing’ claim for £36,000 a year for flights and £26,000 a year ‘on a meal plan just for himself’.
‘He said to me, “I can’t even cook an omelette,”‘ said the judge. ‘Well, my answer to that is, “Learn.” It is not difficult.
‘You do not have to be a master chef to learn how to eat reasonably well.’
Mr Entwistle, whose £2.5 million divorce claim included £26,000 for ‘a meal plan just for himself’, told the original hearing that he ‘couldn’t even cook an omelette’
He added: ‘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.’
At the original hearing last January, Mr Entwistle’s personal assets were estimated to be worth about £850,000 – a fraction of his wife’s wealth, which enabled them to enjoy an ‘opulent standard of living’ after their relationship began in 2016.
He claimed in evidence during the original high court trial that despite signing a prenuptial agreement, he believed it was a ‘tick-box exercise just to keep father on side’ rather than a serious document.
‘Throughout this pre-nup process, [I understood] I was a Helliwell now,’ he said. ‘We are multimillionaires, we don’t elevate people to a lifestyle and then just when we are fed up of them… just because you don’t feel like you want to be in a relationship, just drop them and leave them with nothing.’
Summing up in the court of appeal, his barrister said: ‘The judge didn’t consider the disparity in resources, the length of the relationship, the husband’s contribution to the marriage and the parties’ standard of living.
‘Had he done so, he would not have left the husband in a worse position than before he brought the case, because the costs were £450,000 and he received £325,000.’
The relationship between the former couple, both of whom are 42, began in 2016.
Following a lavish £500,000 wedding in Paris in August 2019, Mr Entwistle ‘enjoyed the trappings of being married into a family of exceptional wealth,’ living in a £4.5 million villa in Dubai gifted to Ms Helliwell by her father, affluent businessman Neil Helliwell.
However, he was ordered out of the family home with 48 hours’ notice in August 2022 after the relationship hit the rocks. Mr Entwistle, originally from Bolton, claimed £2.5m in the subsequent divorce battle.
Edward Faulks KC, for Ms Helliwell, offered a robust rebuttal of Mr Entwistle’s case.
‘The appeal is a challenge to the judge’s findings of fact and the exercise of his discretion as to the weight to be given to the pre-nuptial agreement and the husband’s needs,’ he said.
‘The husband’s narrative of the background… is highly selective and in some respects materially wrong. He asserts as facts aspects of his case which were significantly disputed.
‘He was found to be a dishonest and unreliable witness; conversely the wife was found to be honest, reliable and doing her best at all times to tell the truth to the court.
‘Despite the judge’s findings about the pre-nuptial agreement, he didn’t hold the husband to it.
‘He assessed the husband’s needs on a generous basis and awarded him a lump sum of £400,000 in addition to his own assets. He did so despite the fact that the husband’s ‘needs’ were self-created.
‘They largely arose from his depletion of funds on costs borne of his decision to challenge the pre-nuptial agreement and thereafter reject generous open offers which exceeded his ultimate award.’
He went on to say the husband ‘misrepresents the evidence about the wife’s (financial) disclosure’, telling the court: ‘She was aware that her ‘controlling’ father had placed some of his business interests partly into her name and that of her sister. She did not know the detail of what he had done; still less what the businesses were worth.’
He also denied the wife exerted undue pressure on the husband to sign the pre-nup, adding: ‘it is not unfair or undue pressure to state that you will not get married without a PNA.
‘The husband’s assertion that the wife was the dominant party who pressured him to conclude the PNA is contrary to the judge’s findings and the evidence.
‘He was a confident, experienced, highly educated professional with a knowledge of PNAs. He was financially astute.
‘The wife lacked confidence and was dependent financially and emotionally on her father.
‘Had the husband accepted the wife’s generous offers, the stress and expense of a trial would have been avoided.
‘This was a three-year, childless marriage. It was not his first marriage.
‘It is the wife’s submission that the judge was generous to the husband.’
Lady Justice King, Lord Justice Moylan and Lord Justice Snowden have now reserved their ruling on the case after a day-long hearing, to be given at a later date.