Tuesday, 20 May 2014
The world's most expensive divorce: Russian oligarch ordered to pay out record £2.7 BILLION settlement.
The owner of Monaco football club has been ordered to pay a world record divorce settlement of more than £2.6 billion to his ex-wife.
Judges in Switzerland said Dmitry Rybolovlev, 47, has to give Elena Rybolovleva, who was with him for 24 years, a very precise 4,020,555,987 Swiss francs and 20 centimes.
In current sterling rates, this amounts to £2,681,297,538 and 78 pence – an estimate of half the Russian oligarch’s entire fortune.
It follow a six year legal saga in which Mr Rybolovlev, who made his billions through a successful fertiliser business, bitterly contested Mrs Rybolovleva’s claims to two of the most expensive properties in the USA and a £100million Greek island.
Now Mr Rybolovlev must sign a cheque for the incredible sum in the Swiss city of Geneva, where Mrs Rybolovleva lives in a lakeside mansion.
The settlement is far higher than the £1.5 billion paid by art heir Alec Wildenstein to his ex wife, Jocelyne, which until now had been the largest confirmed public divorce settlement in the world.
Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, was told to give his former wife, Anna, £1 billion in 1999. He went on to marry his third wife Wendi Deng, from whom he is now divorced.
Mr Rybolovlev, who was found by the court to be worth £5.2 billion - although the figure is believed to be a conservative estimate of his wealth - and his ex-wife have been at war since 2008 over the terms of their divorce.
Mrs Rybolovleva won custody of the couple's 13-year-old daughter Anna, along with Mr Rybolovlev's half of their former home in Cologny, an up-market neighbourhood of Geneva.
In 2012, Mrs Rybolovleva claimed a £50 million plus ownership of the New York penthouse which her ex-husband had bought for Anna.
The purchase of the penthouse from the former head of the Citigroup bank, Sandford I.Weill and his wife Joan, was at the time the most expensive home ever bought in New York City.
In court papers filed in Manhattan, Mrs Rybolovleva had said Mr Rybolovlev had been using marital property to buy a multitude of other assets through a variety of trusts and limited liability companies, hoping to put those assets beyond her reach.
Mrs Rybolovleva said these assets include his majority ownership of French soccer club AS Monaco, a $295 million stake in the Bank of Cyprus, and a $95 million Palm Beach, Florida, home purchased from another tycoon, Donald Trump.
Mr Rybolovlev is one of the small group of Russians who became fabulously wealthy during the post-Soviet privatization of the economy and became known as oligarchs. He is the former owner of fertilizer business Uralkali.
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