“A Russian Oligarch’s $500 Million Yacht Is in the Middle of Britain’s Costliest Divorce” (NYT):

In December 2016, a High Court judge ordered Farkhad Akhmedov, a Russian billionaire who has owned a home in England since the ’90s, to pay the equivalent of $646 million to his ex-wife, Tatiana Akhmedova. He refused, arguing that the couple had been divorced in Russia more than a decade ago. For more than a decade, Russian oligarchs have been parking their families and some chunk of their net worth in England. A deal was implied: The oligarchs got a haven from the pitiless realities of Putin-era Russia, and Britain got an influx of very rich people. Now some oligarchs are learning that life here has hazards of its own. That goes even for nonresidents like Mr. Akhmedov, who never became a British citizen. Eager to keep British tax collectors away from his money, he limited the number of days he stayed in England to a maximum of 180 a year. (More recently, the number was reduced to 90 days.)

The plaintiff in this divorce lawsuit is on the defense:

A sunny woman with a mild Russian accent, Ms. Akhmedova wore ripped denim jeans, a batch of string bracelets and a T-shirt that read “Free as a Butterfly.” …. “I don’t want to play the victim, because it’s not my nature,” she said. “But I have to defend myself.”

The NYT accepts uncritically the plaintiff’s narrative that the defendant wouldn’t agree to give her anything via settlement:

She’s also startled by Mr. Akhmedov’s campaign to keep her from pocketing one cent of his $1.4 billion fortune… Ms. Akhmedova said she had always wanted to settle out of court, quietly and for far less than she was awarded.

The journalists never became curious as to why a plaintiff who wanted to settle out of court for minimal dollars hasn’t done so even, for example, after this recent tough-to-collect judgment was issued. The obvious explanation is that the defendant who was clever enough to make $1.4 billion is a completely irrational person?

A reader from Connecticut (one of the best alimony jurisdictions on the planet, though children are more lucrative in neighboring Massachusetts) commented:

Another poster case as to why marriage is an archaic institution designed to enrich lawyers and keep court employment high. Here we have a British law firm, paying a Russian wife, to go after the assets of his Russian husband, when neither is a British citizen nor permanent residents in Britain. It drives home the point that if you are married or have been married, the ownership of any asset you thought you had, is up to a cadre of greedy lawyers and enabling judges. The only way to win is not to play.

For those who are upset that there aren’t enough female founders, it appears that at least one woman’s enterprise has been funded:

[the plaintiff] is living off a lump sum provided to her by Burford Capital, a litigation finance firm, which is helping to fund the legal efforts and will take a percentage of any results.

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