MT v OT (No.2)

I gave a judgment in this matter, which has been transcribed, on 20 April 2018 and the matter now comes back before me today, on 24 May, for the order to be finalised. As might have been anticipated from the history of this litigation, there are a whole series of areas where the parties are apart. It has become increasingly clear as we have gone through the morning amending the order that I must do my very best to try and ensure that the opportunities for the parties to engage their lawyers in yet more expensive and continued litigation needs to be kept to a minimum, consistent, always with the requirements of justice. A number of amendments have been made to the draft order prepared by counsel, some at my instance and some at the instance of Mr Allen QC and Mr Aderemi. In this short judgment I intend to focus just on a few of the more contentious ones.

I start with the re-housing provision, which comes at para.21 of the order. Mr Aderemi has indicated that the father does not wish to keep the current property, and would like to sell it, and the mother has indicated that she would like to move, and thus the discussion has been about how the mechanics of that are to work. There are a number of possibilities in this case which concern me. This property may take its time to sell; that could be for a number of reasons. It could be because purchasers do not want to live very close to the Great North Way, as I mentioned in my judgment. It may be that the father wants it to sell for more than any buyer is willing to pay. It might be that purchasers are put off because it has not been kept in particularly good condition.

It does not seem to me to be right in the circumstances that the mother and children should be required to wait in that property until the father has achieved a sale. In my judgment, she should be able to select her new property and be able to purchase it, and the timetable that I have decided upon is that having found a new property she should give the father not less than 21 days' notice of her intention that that is the home she would want the children to live in and provide him with a copy of the estate agent's particulars. Within that 21 days thereafter the father will be entitled to have his agents and surveyors visit the property and check and confirm that it is an appropriate investment. If within those 21 days he does not give notice of objection, he is required at the expiry of the 21 days to provide the mother with the housing fund. How he does that will be a matter for him. Mr Aderemi says he may not be able to do so. That does not sit very easily with his running of the millionaire's defence and he would, of course, have the security of the property in which the children currently live upon which he could borrow all, or nearly all, the money that the mother and children require for the new purchase. It seems to me fair and reasonable that this provision should be put into place.

Before I move on, I want to deal with the point that Mr Aderemi makes, namely that para.26(ii) of my judgment was, he says, a clear indication that I was ordering that the purchase of the new property should be made solely out of the proceeds of the existing property. I had not so ordered, and I do not believe that anyone could have read that passage of my judgment to be addressing the point with which I am now dealing. I was dealing in that sub-paragraph with the general mechanics of housing, not the particulars of the production of funds and the mechanism by which the purchase would work.

The next paragraph of the order that I want to deal with is para.31, namely the use of the sum of £5,000 per annum which I have set aside for dealing with professional expenses. I am discouraged that in a moment I am going to have to deal with aspects of an application to reinstruct Dr W, a child and adolescent psycho-therapist, which the father has opposed, and it has become quite clear in the exchanges between Mr Allen and Mr Aderemi that the likelihood of agreement between the two sides on these sort of issues is minimal. The father wants there to be a joint letter of instruction to any professional prior to his or her instruction. This seems to me inappropriate in the circumstances. We are talking about modest sums of money, a total of £5,000 per annum. We are talking about a father who, for whatever reason, has hardly been involved in the children's lives at any stage other than in making payments. He does not see the children, he does not know the children. It seems to me his contribution to a letter of instruction cannot be significant. A much better way of dealing with this would be for the mother to instruct the professional and to inform in advance the father of all significant professional involvement and to provide him with copies of referrals and reports.

If the point that I have made about the prospect for further dispute needs any form of elaboration, I need only refer to para.37 of the draft order. The father seeks on a quarterly basis copies of every gas bill, electricity bill, council tax bill, water rate bill, holiday bill, redacted telephone bill and home contents insurance bills. This, in the context of a case where I have made orders for child provision in the maximum total sum of £7,500 per month, inclusive of the cost of running her home and the expenses of their carer (the mother) which will reduce as the children get older and move to tertiary education. Why he needs to see these documents I simply do not understand. It smacks of control. This is a man who is earning each year just under £800,000 per annum. I have calculated what seemed to me to be the appropriate figure for the children's support and it is up to the mother to manage the budget. It should not be the subject of micro-scrutiny by the father and I have accordingly removed that paragraph from the draft order.

That sort of dispute has permeated the arguments that I have had to deal with about the form of the order, and it seems to me that it is incumbent on the court to do everything it can, consistent with fairness, to remove the opportunities for further dispute.

This short judgment that I have delivered should be read alongside the substantive judgment given by me some five weeks ago.