Wei-Lyn Loh v Ardal Loh-Gronager [2025] EWFC 483

Judgment date: 20 October 2025

https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewfc/2025/483

Cusworth J. Sums the husband unilaterally removed from a mortgage account and joint bank accounts during the marriage are held to be part of his entitlement under a pre-nuptial agreement, partially due to conduct findings.

This is the third reported judgment of Cusworth J in the financial remedy proceedings between the wife, Wei-Lyn Loh (W) and the husband, Ardal Loh-Gronager (H). The first judgment was from a preliminary issue hearing around the treatment of chattels under the pre-nuptial agreement and is summarised here. The second judgment, summarised here, follows a directions hearing in which W was given permission to amend her case to plead conduct pursuant to s 25(2)(g) of the MCA.

Background

The parties began cohabiting in 2015 and married on 12 October 2019. Separation occurred in May 2023, although W says the marriage truly ended in autumn 2022. The parties executed a pre-nuptial agreement (PNA) on 11 March 2019 which contained the following relevant terms:

1. Each party to keep their Separate Property. Separate Property was broadly defined as property brought into the marriage or acquired during the marriage through inheritances, gifts, trusts or business interests.
2. Each party to keep any gain and income from ‘Seed Capital’, with Seed Capital being Separate Property used as the initial or subsequent investment into a joint venture or family office, unless a separate deed says the gain should be shared between the parties.
3. Each party to keep their share of the Joint Property, with Joint Property broadly defined as property acquired by any means after the date of the marriage where the legal title is held in W and H’s joint names.
4. W to make a one-off £100,000 lump sum payment to H following the PNA being signed to assist in meeting his interim housing needs if the marriage broke down.
5. The parties to set up a joint bank account which would be used to meet utility bills, household expenses and the day-to-day living expenses of the parties and would largely be funded by W.

H had left banking in 2018 to support renovations on the family home and had assets at the time of the PNA of c.£650,000, including a car gifted by W. W is described in this judgment as being ‘enormously wealthy’. At the time of the final hearing, W was 42 and H was 35. This was a childless marriage.

Issues in dispute

The parties agreed that the PNA should be followed and that H would receive no more than £6.4m under the PNA. Despite this, the costs at the final hearing were c.£4.786m, plus additional costs for some interim applications. The key issue was whether value already received by H throughout the marriage should be treated as his Separate Property or part of his entitlement under the PNA. This key issue was broken down as follows:

1. Whether sums totalling £1.405m, which H accepted he had removed from the parties’ joint bank accounts between 2020 and 2023, were sums he was entitled to remove and would be treated as his Separate Property or were they removed in bad faith (and therefore be taken into account as his entitlement under the PNA)? The court divided this £1.405m into: (a) £655,000 which H had removed over 15 months from January 2020 and placed into a portfolio which formed part of H’s Separate Property. H ‘accepted that the payments taken were not individually authorised’ but said that there was a pattern of provision and gifting by W that had pre-dated the marriage. The evidence provided by H did not support this, nor was it referred to in the PNA. H later suggested W was aware of the transfers and was taken to have accepted them when she did not intervene. W’s position was that she relied on H to run the day-to-day financial aspects of their lives and therefore paid no attention to them. (b) £750,000 taken over 14 months from January 2022 and placed into Loh-Gronager Partners (LGP), an investment fund set up by H, to meet running and operating costs of the fund. W acknowledged that had she known about these transfers, she would have accepted them. However, W had also understood that LGP had been set up for managing her funds, not third-party funds as had occurred. H’s position was that W must have known LGP was being funded from joint accounts. W said she did not know about them.
2. Whether £2.05m taken by H from a mortgage account using a power of attorney on 18 November 2022 was a gift, as he claimed, or was instead taken in bad faith. H used this sum to ‘subscribe into the LGP share class’ with £640,000 from joint account, with further funds coming from W. H said he had to have ‘skin in the game’ for others to invest with him in LGP, and that W had agreed for him to take the £2.05m for this purpose and that it was a gift. This was disputed by W. It was found that in January 2023 W was persuaded by H to pay £1.5m into the mortgage account after H complained of ‘an unexpected property bill and underperformance by LGP’.
3. Were the three emails produced by H around this purported gift from the mortgage account genuine. W says they were not and that H created them for the proceedings.
4. Whether a further £1m H removed from a joint bank account on 8 April 2023, shortly following its deposit into that account from an account in W’s sole name, was a gift or taken by H in bad faith. There was a dispute around whether the transfer from W’s sole account into joint account occurred in W’s presence or by H without W’s knowledge. H asserted this was a gift from W to save the marriage, but also, in contradiction, suggested it was a top up of the one-off fund for living expenses referred to in the PNA.

Judgment

Cusworth J found that the £655,000 removed from joint accounts, the £2.05m removed from the mortgage account and the further £1m removed from the joint accounts were all sums received by H on account of his entitlement under PNA.

Before turning to the issue of conduct and with respect to the £750,000 (issue 1(a) above), he found that although the sums were not authorised by W, they fell ‘broadly within the framework’ of the PNA.

Referring to the test for conduct when applying s 25(2)(g) of the MCA and the Radmacher fairness test, Cusworth J concluded that:

‘there should be no real difference between the two tests, and that they should in effect be considered together. I accept that one goes primarily to the fair implementation of the agreement, the other to broader fairness, perhaps once the impact of the PNA has been considered.’

H’s conduct, throughout the marriage and during the proceedings, was found to have met the threshold under s 25(2)(g).

H accepted during the hearing that he had engaged in behaviour in an attempt to upset and intimidate the W including setting up a private Instagram account posting personal/intimate photos of the W the date before the pFDR hearing and engaging a private investigator ‘to loiter outside the wife’s London home on her birthday, and pose as a member of the press’.

On account of H’s conduct, which was held to be inequitable to disregard, Cusworth J took into account a further £375,000 (50% of the £750,000) as part of H’s entitlement under the PNA, reducing the net sum payable to H to £2,369,385.

The emails produced by H were found to have been created and/or doctored by him. Whilst many factors led to this finding, it was notable that H produced PDFs of the emails (instead of the emails themselves) which the metadata showed had been modified minutes after their creation. H had apparently deleted the emails during the proceedings and after producing the PDFs. H said he had done so in line with therapeutic advice. This was not substantiated by his therapist.

Cusworth J suggested that ‘prima facie there is a real prospect that a very substantial order may be made against’ H and referred the parties to the relevant case law dealing with costs on an indemnity basis.