former chairman of ICI has won a court battle to evict his ex-wife from their “super-prime” £14 million Chelsea home so that he can sell it.
The Court of Appeal accepted that Charles Miller Smith was “haemorrhaging money” on the southwest London property and could not be expected to keep up monthly mortgage payments of £27,000.
The three judges gave Debjani Miller Smith, 44, three months to leave the home in Egerton Terrace that she jointly owned with her former husband.
Lord Justice Wilson said that Mrs Miller Smith had used her interior design skills to create a home of “style and beauty”. When the home is sold, she will receive half of the proceeds — a sum likely to exceed £2 million.
Mr Miller Smith, 70, said he could not be expected to spend around £228,000 a year maintaining the house together with £100,000 a year on his own accommodation and £18,000 a year maintenance for his former wife. He was chairman of ICI until 2001. His first wife, Dorothy, died in 1999. Debjani had been company secretary and they married in 2004.
The couple bought a long lease on the property in 2005 for £4 million and paid a further £2 million for the freehold the following year. An 18-month refurbishment followed, increasing the cost of the home to £7.4 million, with Mr Miller Smith paying a £5.5 million mortgage.
By the time they moved into the house, they were seeing marriage guidance counsellors. In January last year, after five months there, Mr Miller Smith moved out. The couple were divorced in October, after Mrs Miller Smith contested his petition citing her unreasonable behaviour. She denied that the marriage had broken down irretrievably or that she had acted unreasonably.
Lord Justice Wilson said the former husband’s net income was about £350,000 a year. He had at first claimed that he could not afford to maintain the house but, days before a hearing over the issue in the High Court Family Division, he disclosed that he had been paid £720,000 net on a corporate deal.
“So the basis of his case became not that it was impossible to continue to maintain the home, at any rate in the short term, but that it was unreasonable to expect him to do so,” said Lord Justice Wilson.
The judge added: “The husband filed his petition for divorce in May 2008; sadly the main subject of his petition, and therefore of the wife’s answer, filed in July 2008, surrounded responsibility for difficulties in her relationship with his three adult children. The breakdown of the marriage was a source of intense pain for both parties and, obviously, the wife was slow in becoming able to accept the fact of it.”
Source: Times Online