City boss ‘ hacked ex-wife’s emails in fight over two villas and Aston Martin’
A CITY broker ordered his ex- wife’s emails to be hacked in a bid to discover her true wealth when their divorce turned sour, a court has heard.
Initially Daniel and Catriona Arbili agreed to share assets which included a £ 1million grade- II listed home, two French villas, an Aston Martin and watches worth £50,000.
Now Mr Arbili, 43, a former £120,000-a-year boss at specialist broker JB Drax, is trying to have the settlement reconsidered.
he says emails were found suggesting that Mrs Arbili, 44, could have been in line for a windfall from the sale of her parents’ £2.1million home in St Paul de Vence, near Nice on the French Riviera. however, her lawyers have branded the evidence ‘illicit’.
‘ The husband invaded the wife’s privacy and did so by hacking her computer,’ Mrs Arbili’s barrister Bruce Blair QC told the Court of Appeal.
‘This intrusion was far removed from something such as pilfering from a particular file from a particular drawer.
‘This was at the worst end of invasion of the wife’s privacy across the board.’
The couple met in Monaco in 2002 and married three years later, settling in a £ 1million grade-II listed barn conversion in the pretty village of White Roding, in essex.
But Mr Arbili left home in 2012 as the marriage faltered, and the couple were divorced the following year.
he was awarded a Cote D’Azur villa, where his parents live, some development land in France and other possessions, including the watches and his Aston Martin.
his ex-wife got the equity in the family home, another French property and a £140,000 lump sum to provide her with a total of almost £600,000 to buy a new home.
But as the judge prepared to formally deliver his judgment in late 2013, Mr Arbili tried to re- open the case, citing the new evidence. he claimed to have instructed a French enquiry agent, known as a facteur, who put a private investigator on the trail of his ex-wife’s financial affairs.
Mr Arbili received the information in a hand- over with the agent in London, but failed to name the agent, the private investigator, or reveal his instructions to them.
When the first divorce judge refused to consider the new evidence, Mr Arbili launched an appeal claiming the settlement was ‘unfair’ to him because it left his ex-wife with an unequal share of their possessions.
Jeremy hall QC, for Mr Arbili, said: ‘The division over-catered for the wife’s needs and paid scant regard to the husband’s.’
If the judge was not going to include her potential interest in her parents’ £2.1million home in his calculations, then he should also have left out the £300,000 Cote D’Azur property in the husband’s name and occupied by his parents, the barrister argued.
Mr Blair said the difference between the properties was that Mr Arbili’s parents’ home was paid for by him during the marriage, while the wife’s was paid for by her parents and her interest in it could only be realised on their deaths.
The appeal judges Lady Justice Macur and Sir Bernard Rix reserved their decision on Mr Arbili’s appeal until a later date.
‘Over-catered for her needs’