Divorce can be a very lengthy, torturous and expensive experience. However if you wish to remarry it is necessary to get divorced in the eyes of the law, and of course doesn’t always have to be a difficult experience.
Some people though choose not to get divorced, and instead remarry while they’re still married to their first wife. One such man is Roderick Gordon Sangster, who was recently jailed for bigamy and sentenced to three years in prison.
His lawyer said in court, when he was sentenced, that his client had regret about his actions. Sangster is said to have preyed on women who were financially well off, but emotionally vulnerable. He married his wife Janet Pollard in 2004, but unfortunately for her he never divorced his existing wife, Jill.
Sangster took out a £10,000 loan in Janet Pollard’s name after forging her signature, and then ran off, leaving her with the debt.
Sangster was tried without being present as he had fled the court, but turned himself in before he was due to be sentenced.
Judge Coates said to Sangster as he sentenced him for bigamy:
I cannot come to any conclusion other than that the marriages to Jill and the association with Janet were to help you financially.
One of the world’s most famous footballers, former Arsenal star Thierry Henry, has reportedly settled his divorce with his ex-wife Claire Merry, by paying her £8 million. The figure his ex-wife wanted was a lot more than £8 million as she’d claimed future earnings from Henry, demanding £10 million from the star.
Henry’s fortune is estimated at £25 million, and he currently earns £130,000 each week from his club side, Barcelona. The couple failed to reach a settlement when they went to court, but came to the agreement outside of court. The couple divorced over a year ago when Thierry’s wife discovered texts from the footballer to another woman on his mobile. She cited ‘unreasonable behaviour’ for the divorce.
According to a friend of Claire Merry, who reportedly gave an interview to the tabloid newspaper, the Sun:
Claire is delighted. Neither she or Thierry wanted to go back to court as they are both now moving on with their lives. She is happy with the conclusion. She said it is close to the £10million she wanted.
The couple met while they filmed the Va-va-voom Renault TV ads together.
Conservative grandee Sir Paul Judge has come under fire from his ex-wife, Anne-Marie, who wants a judge to reopen their divorce case because she wants an extra £5 million from her former husband.
Anne-Marie claims that her ex-husband owes her the money, a total of £5.6 million, because he never paid it to a trust as he had planned.
The couple divorced in 2001, and should Anne-Marie be successful in her claim she would double the £5 million that she was paid in the original split. Her divorce lawyer, James Turner QC, claimed that the decision to award his client £5 million in 2001 was a mistake. He claims that Sir Paul Judge ‘misrepresented’ his financial status when they divorced.
The blame, so far as blame matters, must lie on Sir Paul’s part because it was within his knowledge and his gift to set out the correct position and provide correct information. So in a sense he must accept the blame, but without saying it was deliberate conduct on his part.
Originally Sir Paul Judge’s assets were valued at £30 million, but £14 million was discounted from the settlement because he claimed he had promised it to a charity. This reimbursement never happened, and Sir Paul Judge kept the extra £14 million.
On that basis £14 million that would otherwise have been divided between Sir Paul and Lady Judge in the same proportions as the other available wealth was notionally deducted from the overall net asset figure and left in the hands of Sir Paul.
Ivana Trump, former wife of US tycoon Donald Trump, is set for her fourth divorce, according to reports. Fifty-nine-year-old Ivana, who has only been married to husband number four for seven months, filed for separation just three months ago from her husband, Rossana Rubicondi, an Italian businessman
The report is according to People magazine. They claim that Trump didn’t announce the separation sooner due to her husband’s role on the Italian version of Survivor, a reality TV show where celebrities try to cope in a desert island.
According to Ivana Trump:
Rossano wants to live in Miami and work in Milan. But, I am a New Yorker and my family, friends and businesses are here. As the beautiful song says, ‘Que sera sera!’
Ivana and Rossana were married in Florida, on Palm Beach, in April this year. They had been together six years before deciding to tie the knot.
The wedding was extremely lavish, with Rossana walking down the aisle to the theme from Rocky.
Different European countries rarely agree on anything, but for the last three years a number of countries across Europe have been trying to tie up one rule for everyone; at least where divorce is concerned.
Twenty-seven European nations have been working for the last three years to attempt to make it simpler for couples who are from different countries in Europe to get divorced.
One plan, from the European Commission, was to ensure that couples from different nationalities could get divorced under the laws from the country in which they lived most recently. However, this was resisted by Sweden because they feared that Islamic law could be enforced in Sweden as a result of many of the new inhabitants that have come from Iran and Iraq. This would mean that residents in Sweden could face laws that were against Sweden’s proud traditions of upholding women’s rights.
Eight countries announced in July that they would push ahead with the new divorce rule, despite the objection from Sweden. The countries being Greece, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Slovenia and Luxembourg.
When Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced that they were getting divorced, the world’s media assumed there would be a bitter, long and public battle between the two over property and finances. It looks however as though that’s not going to happen as the couple were granted a quick divorce last week in the high court.
Without either Madonna or Ritchie being present, the couple’s eight-year marriage was terminated as they were granted a decree nisi. This means that the divorce will be finalised, with the decree absolute, in just six weeks assuming there are no disputes from either party.
It looked at one stage as though a huge battle over the couple’s extensive finances would commence when Madonna hired Paul McCartney’s divorce lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, but the low key divorce last week looks to have ended speculation of a dispute over money. According to reports, Guy Ritchie hasn’t made any claim to the American singer’s considerable fortune.
The decree nisi was granted after the couple had declared, in a sworn statement, that they had not lived together for six months. Madonna cited unreasonable behaviour as grounds for divorce.
He’s one of the richest men in the world, yet billionaire Bernie Ecclestone, the boss of the richest sport in the world, Formula One motorsport, may be about to head for the divorce courts. If he does, it could spark the biggest divorce case in history.
Bernie’s wife, the Amazonian Slavica Ecclestone, has moved out of the couple’s home in Chelsea and into a flat owned by her daughter’s boyfriend.
Bernie has a fortune estimated at £2.4 billion, made from TV deals for Formula One, and a lucrative bonds sale in 1999. However for tax reasons much of Bernie’s fortune has been transferred to his wife Slavica, meaning that any divorce case could get very messy if the couple can’t be amicable over a split.
The couple are a very unlikely pair, with ten inches and nearly thirty years between them. They met at the Italian Grand Prix in 1982 when Slavica was just twenty-four.
Bernie Ecclestone reportedly said about his wife moving out of their £10 million London home:
The reason she has moved out is because they are doing building work next door and it is impossible to live in the house. She can’t stand the noise. I don’t know if she wants a divorce or not. She has moved into an apartment, belonging to Petra’s boyfriend. We have people in the house taping the noise so we can go to the council to get something done about it.
In the last two weeks, Britain saw its first ‘virtual divorce’ when Amy Taylor divorced her husband David Pollard when she caught him cheating on her with a woman in a video game called Second Life. The two had met in the game, then moved in with each other and got married, before David started seeing another woman, digitally, for extra marital relations.
Amy divorced her husband, only for him to get engaged with the woman he was seeing – despite having never ‘actually’ met her, and despite the fact that she’s from the USA.
Amy herself has found another man, but this time from the video game World of Warcraft.
Now divorce experts say that virtual relationships, marriages and eventually divorces will become more common in the UK.
According to Dr Aric Sigman, who spoke with Sky News Online:
I am sure this type of divorce is going to be an increasing phenomena, there’s no doubt about it.
It’s going to be a huge problem, especially when you consider what will happen when the Facebook generation grows up, because all they are doing is interacting with an image on screen.
It’s what they are not doing in real life that leads to these divorces. Britain is the most time-poor country in Europe, so when people are spending the few hours they have in a virtual world, it’s worrying.
With 15 million people already playing Second Life, and the level of addiction encountered with video games, the Internet is proving an environment for ‘safe’ relationships to blossom.
You probably wouldn’t associate Hollywood actor Will Smith with giving relationship advice, unless of course you’re referring to his performance in the movie ‘Hitch’, where he played a relationship expert. It seems ‘Big Willy’ is something of a relationship guru for real, as he’s been offering advice on relationships in a recent interview for the magazine ‘Essence’, which will go on sale in December.
Will Smith has been married for eleven years, to his wife Jada Pinkett, and the couple have three children. According to Will, in order to have a successful marriage you need to completely remove the option of divorce.
Will states:
The truth about life is that we’re all alone.
But when somebody loves you, that experience is shared. Love is the only real connective tissue that allows you to not live and die by yourself.
The secret is removing divorce as an option. Anyone who gives themselves that option will get a divorce.
Will says that in order to make a relationship work you need to constantly work at it, as he has done with his wife.
Former Prime Minister of Thailand, and former owner of Manchester City, Thaksin Shinawatra, has quietly divorced his wife according to reports. Both Thaksin and his wife Potjaman have received jail sentences in Thailand.
Many experts believe however that Thaksin’s move to divorce his wife isn’t led by a marital breakdown, but instead motivated by financial reasons; in order to protect his sizable fortune from being dispersed.
Shinawatra had his UK visa terminated by the Home Office a few weeks ago, not long after his sale of Manchester City to the Abu Dhabi United Group went through. Shinawatra was also convicted of corruption in Thailand, and his divorce went through at the consulate in Hong Kong.
Shinawatra’s spokesman, Phongthep Thepkanjana, confirmed that Thaksin and Potjaman had divorced, but stated that the divorce would affect the legal wrangling over Thaksin’s personal fortune that had been seized by the Thai government.
Many persons are owners of those assets, and those assets have been frozen. If you check with the list of the assets, those assets belong to more than ten people.
He did refuse to comment on the whereabouts of either Thaksin or Potjaman, and also wouldn’t comment on whether either of them would try to re-enter the UK.
