Heiress’s £100m divorce tests UK pre-nuptial law

A GERMAN heiress is taking her ex-husband to court to enforce a pre-nuptial agreement that would leave him without a penny of her £100 million.

The landmark legal case will determine if the agreement, which was signed in Germany, is valid in the English courts.

If Katrin Radmacher, a paper industry heiress and one of Germany's wealthiest women, is successful it would pave the way for pre-nuptial contracts to become legally binding under English law.

Ms Radmacher, 39, claims her former investment banker husband, with whom she has two young children, has not honoured the pre-nuptial deal they signed before they married in 1998.

She has accused him of trying to cash in on her family's wealth. An earlier High Court hearing ignored her pleas and awarded her 38-year-old French ex-husband Nicolas Granatino a lump sum of £5.6 million.

The couple met in Tramp members' nightclub and married in Britain in November 1998, setting up home in South Kensington. A few months earlier they signed a pre-nuptial agreement, recognised in both Germany and France, in which they agreed neither would make a financial claim against the other.

When they married, Mr Granatino was a banker with JP Morgan earning as much as £324,000 a year while his wife was running a fashion boutique with her sister in Knightsbridge.

In 2003, he quit his job to pursue a doctorate in biotechnology at Oxford, the move coinciding with the breakdown in their marriage.

They separated in 2006, by which time Mr Granatino was earning as little as £30,000 a year. Ms Radmacher has accused him of deliberately delaying his doctorate to "maximise his claim". She believes that if he "wishes to be an academic he must live as such", rather than enjoy a millionaire's lifestyle funded by her.

But at a hearing in the High Court in July, judge Mrs Justice Baron ruled that it would be "manifestly unfair" to hold Mr Granatino to the pre-nuptial contract and ordered Ms Radmacher to pay her ex-husband £5.6 million one-off compensation. Mr Granatino had been demanding just over £9 million.

Ms Radmacher, who has since returned to Dusseldorf where the children go to school, will go to the Court of Appeal next week to overturn that ruling in a case that has cost more than £1.1 million in legal fees.

Mr Granatino has hired divorce lawyers Fiona Shackleton and Nicholas Mostyn QC, the legal team which represented Sir Paul McCartney in his divorce from Heather Mills.

Divorce lawyers are watching the case with interest. London has enjoyed a recent boom in divorce cases, prompted in part by the number of wealthy couples who choose to live here and a string of landmark hearings that have made it favourable for poorer spouses to receive huge pay-outs.

Most experts believe that Ms Radmacher is unlikely to succeed in the case.

Julian Lipson, head of the family law department at Withers law firm, said today: "The English courts pride themselves on protecting the financially weaker party and that will over-ride the argument that the financially weaker spouse knew what they were signing and should be held to the bargain, even if it is a bad one."