Hidden financial assets and divorce
Divorce, like all forms of litigation, can be a very dirty business. A common theme of litigation cases is where one of the parties strongly believes or knows that the other is concealing evidence, whether relevant to the issue of legal liability or the value of the claim or on the issue of enforcing a judgment.
It is always difficult in any legal jurisdiction for the courts to strike a balance. Judges will all be aware that hiding evidence and assets goes on all the time, and should not be allowed. As against that, the courts cannot allow a free-for-all “fishing expedition” where one party succeeds in demanding huge amounts of paperwork from the other party and connected 3rd parties to prove or disprove a “hunch”. Then there is the issue of privacy, data protection and improperly obtained evidence.
On this latter issue, the landmark case of Immerman from last year pushed the boundaries somewhat back in favour of the concealer, in that improperly obtained evidence, even where highly relevant, may not be accepted into evidence by the court.
As a consequence of this, a recent survey of lawyers indicates that a high number of family lawyers believe that concealing assets is a serious problem in divorce cases. The findings of a recent survey by Grant Thornton accountants found that nearly 50% of family lawyers believe that individuals may conceal assets in divorce proceedings.
To us, this is clearly a serious problem. The intersection between family law, data protection and privacy is never going to be an easy one but has Immerman gone too far ?