Curtain set to fall on rancorous McCartney divorce
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on March 17, 2008
The curtain is due to fall on one of the world’s most public - and nastiest - divorce battles in recent history on Monday, with a ruling on how much money Sir Paul McCartney will have to hand over to Heather Mills.Reports yesterday said that Ms Mills, the ex-model and animal rights activist, would walk away with about 25m - a tidy sum, but short of the record payouts awarded to ex-wives of top businessmen such as Sir Martin Sorrell and John Charman.Mr Justice Bennett, who perhaps drew the short straw when assigned to a case known in the tabloid press only as “Macca v Mucca”, is still weighing releasing part of the judgment to the public, depending on the pair’s views.Whether that will satisfy a media pack that sought to divine larger meaning from their clothing as well as the most insignificant of gestures during a closed High Court hearing last month is unclear.Barring exceptional circumstances, family law cases are held in private. Lawyers said the McCartney divorce highlighted the problems this lack of transparency presented in high-profile cases.Sir Paul and Ms Mills, who split in 2006 after four years of marriage, were variously reported to be on the verge of a settlement or tens of millions of pounds apart, depending on the day and the news outlet.”The sad reality is that we are left with reports based on rumours and information received from insiders and close friends, which is often either misleading, misinformed or misunderstood,” said Joanna Grandfield, a barrister at Mills %26amp; Reeve.The Ministry of Justice scrapped proposals to open the family courts to press and public in a volte-face in 2007, suggesting instead that the department focused its resources on fostering a better understanding on how the courts worked.However, the resulting tension between the availability of information about important family law cases and the need to protect the privacy of those involved had only intensified in recent years, lawyers said.Whether the McCartney case will set any new guidelines for “big-money” divorces is also unclear.Various courts have already weighed in on some of the key issues at stake, for example on how much an ex-spouse is due in a short marriage and on rights to future income streams.Much of the speculation centred on whether the amount awarded to Ms Mills would top the 48m awarded to Beverley Charman in 2007 after a long battle with her insurance magnate husband over a dynastic family trust.A settlement of between 25m-30m, as forecast by some leading family lawyers before the hearing started, may also bolster rumours that Sir Paul is worth less than the 825m figure widely cited by the press.
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