When Merleen D’Andrade signed her last marriage contract with Toronto millionaire Alvin Schrage four years ago, she didn’t tell him she was having an affair.

Nor, the much older and wealthier man claims, did his wife tell him she was thinking of leaving their marriage of six years.

In a decision released this week, a judge ruled she needn’t have done either, because marriage contracts require financial, not sexual, honesty.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Harriet Sachs ordered Schrage, 73, to pay his former wife the $250,000 still owing.

“I felt vindicated,” D’Andrade, 46, said Thursday in a phone interview from British Columbia, where she now lives.

“It’s been three years of needless fighting and this was such a great relief.”

Schrage said he was shocked.

“I feel hard done by,” he said by phone from Florida.

“A marriage contract is more than just a financial contract. There has to be some degree of understanding by both parties.”

When the couple started living together in 1998, she was a 34-year-old bank worker worth $40,000. He was a 61-year-old businessman worth $4 million.

As an older man infatuated with a younger woman, he wanted the protection of a domestic contract.

They would go on to share a cottage, a house in Florida and a matrimonial home in Armour Heights, near Avenue Rd. and Highway 401. D’Andrade collected Swarovski crystals, Royal Doulton figurines and Estée Lauder compacts and displayed them in a curio cabinet.

When Schrage discovered her affair in 2008, he told her they were through.

Then they went to court.

Schrage’s lawyer, Steven Bookman, argued that the couple’s final marriage contract, signed in 2007, should be set aside. D’Andrade breached her obligation of good faith by not disclosing she was thinking of separating, he argued.

But the judge ruled otherwise.

“To require spouses to disclose their thoughts about the likelihood of separation or their involvement in extra-marital activity before signing a marriage contract could have serious implications for the survival of marital relationships,” she wrote.

The law has eliminated the issue of “conduct” in the analysis of financial entitlement, Sachs said. “Mr. Schrage is seeking to reintroduce conduct into the consideration of whether a marriage contract should be set aside.”

Marriage contracts require both parties act in good faith in disclosing their financial positions, not their affairs or intention to separate, she said.

In any event, D’Andrade insists they discussed the possibility of separating before she signed the contract, one of four they entered into over the years. “It was no surprise,” she said. The new contract didn’t improve her position, she said.

Her lawyer, Dani Frodis, called the fight ridiculous. “There should not have been any dispute,” he said.

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“I think the outcome was easy to anticipate.”

Even if the judge had set aside the latest contract, D’Andrade would have been covered by the previous contract, Frodis said.

Schrage’s lawyer disagrees. Bookman stressed he never argued that the affair had to be disclosed, only that thoughts of separation should. “Clearly, nobody is going to disclose an affair, nor are they obliged to do that.’”