Background
In financial remedy proceedings following the breakdown of MF and NF’s marriage, the wife disputed the husband’s account of assets potentially worth millions of pounds. Her claims concerned a Spanish property known as VLO, which the husband legally owned but said he had gifted beneficially to his mother, AF, and the proceeds from the 2017 sale of Y Ltd, which had passed to a trust associated with KN before substantial sums were loaned to the husband and his business.
The wife alleged, among other things, that the declaration of trust concerning VLO was a sham or a disposition intended to defeat her financial claims, and that the husband was beneficially entitled to the Y Ltd sale proceeds or could access them through the trust. District Judge Ashworth struck out the relevant Points of Claim, removed KN as a party, and alternatively relied on the Family Court’s wider case-management powers. The wife appealed.
The Court’s Holding
Mr Justice MacDonald allowed the appeal and set aside the orders striking out the claims against AF and KN, as well as the order removing KN as a party. The district judge had wrongly imported a summary-judgment test into FPR r.4.4(1), assessing the merits and prospects of success of the wife’s claims instead of asking whether they were legally recognisable and fell within the rule’s express strike-out grounds.
The court held that the deliberate omission from the Family Procedure Rules of a summary-judgment power equivalent to CPR Part 24 could not be circumvented through the wider case-management powers in FPR r.4.1 or the overriding objective. Although the wife’s allegations were not fully particularised, they rested on pleaded facts relevant to ownership and disposition, and their merits—including whether the VLO declaration was a sham—were matters for the preliminary trial. The district judge had also been factually wrong to state that the wife had not applied under s.37 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973.
Key Takeaways
- FPR r.4.4(1) permits strike out on its stated grounds but does not authorize summary judgment based on a claim’s prospects of success.
- The Family Court’s general case-management powers cannot be used to recreate a summary-judgment power deliberately omitted from the Family Procedure Rules.
- Third-party property disputes in financial remedy proceedings may require a preliminary trial where legally recognisable claims turn on contested facts, disclosure, credibility, or potential adverse inferences.
Why It Matters
The decision clarifies the procedural protection afforded to spouses asserting third-party ownership claims within financial remedy proceedings. A court may robustly exclude irrelevant issues, but it cannot determine a relevant property dispute summarily merely because it considers the claim weak.
For third parties joined to family proceedings, the ruling confirms that substantive property law remains the same across jurisdictions while the available procedure does not: the summary-judgment mechanism available in ordinary civil litigation cannot simply be imported into the Family Procedure Rules.