The courts’ approach to hidden assets divorce disclosure has rarely looked sharper than it does right now. A run of recent judgments, culminating in decisions from 2025 and 2026, has made plain that complexity in wealth structures offers no protection to a spouse who chooses concealment over candour, and that the consequences, financial and reputational, can follow someone for decades.
MK v SK: When Offshore Structures Cannot Hide the Reality
In MK v SK [2026] EWFC 28, Mr Justice Peel heard allegations that the husband had concealed wealth behind complex offshore arrangements. According to St Mary’s Chambers, the wife alleged that the husband had accessible resources held principally in a trust that contained his shares in a global technology group. The court agreed with her case: the husband had concealed wealth, whether inside a trust, some other structure, or held by individuals acting on his behalf.
Two principles emerge from the judgment that matter well beyond the parties themselves. The first is familiar but worth restating: the court looks through formal title and legal ownership to the reality of a person’s financial position. The second is newer in its articulation. Where the true scale of wealth simply cannot be quantified, St Mary’s Chambers notes that the court may construct a financial picture from the available evidence and determine that the outcome is ultimately needs-based. For very wealthy individuals and the family offices, trustees and advisers who work with them, both points carry a clear instruction: informal arrangements, opaque governance and weak documentation will not survive judicial scrutiny.
Prenuptial Agreements Are Not a Shield Against Non-Disclosure
Helliwell v Entwistle brought a different but equally instructive angle. The marriage had lasted three years. Before it began, the parties had entered into a prenuptial agreement in which they each asserted they had fully and frankly disclosed their financial resources. The wife had not. She had failed to disclose assets amounting to 73% of her wealth, including business assets and a 50% interest in property. The Court of Appeal found the non-disclosure deliberate and sent the case back to the High Court to assess the husband’s needs.
The case matters because it dismantles two comfortable assumptions. First, that hidden assets divorce disclosure is a problem that falls more heavily on one side of a marriage than the other: it does not. Second, that a prenuptial agreement’s disclosure threshold is somehow lower than that required in full proceedings: the court made clear it is not. Prenuptial schedules are often high-level summaries, which can feel reassuring without actually being complete. When a party asserts that disclosure is full and it later proves otherwise, the agreement’s protective value may be lost entirely.
The Gohil Legacy: Orders Can Be Reopened Years Later
No account of financial non-disclosure in divorce would be complete without the Gohil proceedings, which cast a long shadow over the field. The Supreme Court in 2015 allowed Mrs Gohill to set aside a settlement made eleven years earlier after evidence emerged of her former husband’s concealed wealth and money-laundering activity. Mr Gohill had by then been sentenced to ten years in prison.
What the report of legal history obscures is quite how long Mrs Gohill’s road proved to be. The Financial Remedies Journal records that the restored claim, Gohil v Gohil [2025] EWHC 3646 (Fam), required the High Court to grapple with a £28m confiscation order, disputed beneficial ownership claims and the question of which assets were criminally tainted. The final determination of Mrs Gohill’s financial claims did not arrive until May 2025, some twenty years after separation. She received the entirety of the identified untainted assets. The message for any spouse tempted by concealment is stark: the court’s reach does not expire when a consent order is sealed.
Running alongside Gohil, the Supreme Court’s decision in Sharland reinforced the same principle from a different direction. Mr Sharland had misrepresented the value of his shareholding in a software business. The difficulty of measuring precisely how that misrepresentation affected the outcome was held to be no barrier to overturning the original order. A dishonest spouse, the court was clear, cannot shelter behind the very uncertainty their dishonesty creates.
The Practical Challenge for the Financially Weaker Spouse
For the spouse on the other side of a complex wealth structure, the legal framework is cold comfort without the means to interrogate it. Most people entering divorce proceedings are not forensic accountants. Even commercially sophisticated individuals may have limited visibility into the true structure of family wealth, particularly after a long marriage in which financial expertise has quietly concentrated in one partner’s hands.
Allegations of hidden assets divorce disclosure failures often surface right at the start of a case, before evidence exists to test them. The role of good legal advice, as Hughes Fowler Carruthers sets out, is not simply to review what has been disclosed but to probe early and rigorously for what has not. In a landscape where trust structures, cross-border assets and complex governance arrangements have become the norm among the ultra-wealthy, that early scrutiny is the most effective tool a financially weaker spouse has. The courts have shown they will do their part when concealment is proven. The task for advisers is ensuring the evidence gets before them.