What Happens When You Don't Disclose All Your Assets in Court Hearings?

When an application to deal with a financial settlement in divorce is made, there is an ongoing duty for each party to provide disclosure of their finances. This means providing evidence of all your assets, liabilities, income and outgoings. Some parties however believe that they can get away with not disclosing some of their finances in order to get a better settlement for themselves.

So what happens when you don’t disclose all of your financial circumstances?

The other party may believe that their spouse has hidden assets and may want to find them and disclose them to the court themselves. Such self-help is no longer found to be appropriate after the case of Imerman –v- Imerman (2010). If you do this the court may decide that the evidence cannot be used. 

The better way to deal with non-disclosure is to use lawful methods. Evidence may be obtained from public documents or the court can make disclosure orders against third parties, such as accountants. 

If a spouse continues to fail to provide proper disclosure then the court can draw adverse inferences, for instance, they could decide that the asset exists giving the other party a more favourable settlement.

A recent case, Bloom –v- Bloom (2017), took further steps against the non-disclosing spouse, Mr Bloom. Financial remedy hearings are, as a general rule, kept private. However, in this case, the non-disclosure was found to be a serious fraud and it was felt that it was in the public interest for the judgment to be made public and, in particular, that the parties would not be anonymous in the judgment. Further, the judgment was reported to the authorities, such as HMRC, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Attorney General, and the Director of Public Prosecutions which likely will result in their taking action against Mr Bloom.