The consequences of divorce financial non-disclosure have rarely felt more immediate than they do right now, with a run of court decisions reminding even the most sophisticated wealth-holders that concealment carries a price, however long it takes to collect.
The legal obligation is not new. Every divorcing spouse carries an identical duty of full and frank disclosure of their assets and resources during financial remedy proceedings, regardless of how those assets are structured, in which jurisdiction they sit, or through which vehicles they are held. What has shifted, in an era of increasingly elaborate cross-border wealth planning, is the courts’ appetite for looking beneath the surface of that planning to find the reality underneath.
MK v SK and the Reach of the Trust
In MK v SK [2026] EWFC 28, Mr Justice Peel considered allegations that a husband had concealed assets within a trust structure across what Paradigm Family Law reports was a 19-year marriage. The court agreed, finding that the husband had indeed concealed wealth and that he enjoyed access to undisclosed assets, whether through a trust, some other structure, or via individuals holding assets on his behalf.
The structural detail matters here. According to the Financial Remedies Journal, the husband’s shareholding in the Group was held via Holdings Ltd, with the shares in Holdings Ltd then placed into the first A Trust. It is precisely this kind of layered arrangement, legally coherent on its face, that the court was prepared to look through in order to establish the real picture of what the husband could access.
The case is a pointed reminder to family offices, trustees and advisers that informal arrangements between wealthy individuals and the structures they have established carry real governance risk. Clear documentation, strong oversight and an honest anticipation of future disclosure requirements are not optional extras in these circumstances. They are protections against exactly this kind of scrutiny.
Prenuptial Agreements Are Not Exempt
Last year, Helliwell v Entwistle made clear that divorce financial non-disclosure is not confined to proceedings that happen after a marriage breaks down. The parties had entered into a prenuptial agreement before a three-year marriage, each asserting in that document that they had ‘fully and frankly’ disclosed their financial resources and liabilities. The wife had not. She had failed to disclose assets amounting to 73% of her wealth, including her business assets and a 50% interest in property.
The Court of Appeal found the failure was deliberate and returned the case to the High Court to assess the husband’s needs. The broader message is that the disclosure standard required when signing a prenuptial agreement carries the same weight as that required during divorce proceedings proper. The protection any prenuptial agreement offers can be hollowed out entirely by incomplete financial schedules, particularly when those schedules are accompanied by an express assertion of completeness.
With pre and postnuptial agreements growing steadily more common, this is unlikely to be the last time this point is tested in court.
Old Orders, Long Memories
The weight of authority behind all of this runs deep. In Gohill in 2015, the Supreme Court allowed a settlement order made 11 years earlier to be set aside after evidence of the former husband’s concealed wealth and money-laundering activity emerged. He had by then been sentenced to 10 years in prison. The final determination of the wife’s financial claims did not come until May 2025, some 20 years after the separation, when the court was able to establish which assets were matrimonial property and untainted by criminal conduct. She received the entirety of the identified untainted assets.
In Sharland, decided at the same time, a husband had misrepresented the value of his shareholding in a software business. The court set aside the original order, making explicit that a dishonest spouse cannot benefit from the uncertainty their own non-disclosure creates, even where the precise financial impact is hard to calculate.
Taken together, these cases form a consistent body of law with a single, durable message: orders can be reopened, sometimes decades later, and complexity is not an excuse for concealment.
The Weaker Spouse in a Complex Marriage
For the financially less powerful spouse in an ultra-high net worth marriage, the challenge cuts differently. Most are not forensic accountants. Even commercially experienced individuals may lack the visibility into layered family wealth structures to evaluate whether their spouse’s disclosure is complete.
That difficulty is sharpened by timing. Allegations of non-disclosure tend to surface at the very start of proceedings, before any supporting evidence has been gathered. The role of good advisers, as Hughes Fowler Carruthers notes, is not merely to review what has been provided but to apply early, rigorous scrutiny, probing for what is absent rather than simply checking what is there.
In MK v SK, the court looked past formal legal title to the reality of a party’s access to wealth. That is the standard against which all disclosure in these cases will now be measured.