Clive Joy, a former aviation tycoon, has failed in his High Court bid to avoid paying spousal maintenance to his ex-wife and mother of his 3 children, Nichola Joy.
In 2015, Mr Joy claimed he was mired in debts of millions after he had been excluded from a trust, worth over £70 million, that he had set up a few years earlier. The judge held that Mr Joy had two horrors in his life – paying any tax and paying anything to his ex-wife – and that his story about his exclusion from the trust and his subsequent penury was ‘an elaborate charade’ and a ‘rotten edifice founded on concealment and misrepresentation’.
Mr Joy lives in a luxury 6-bedroom chateau in France with a full-time housekeeper. Yet, through his QC and junior barrister, Mr Joy told the Court that he could not afford to pay his wife the £10,000 a month he had been ordered to pay in 2015.
In a judgment published today, Sir Peter Singer, sitting as the High Court judge, dismissed Mr Joy’s arguments.
The judge, who in 2015 said Mr Joy had deliberately “set about obscuring the true situation as to past, present and future” and referred to his “blatant dishonesty”, was not persuaded that Mr Joy was a changed man, now to be wholly trusted, and expressed the view that his “allegedly disastrously deflated fortunes” would somehow be repaired once the legal case was over.
Mrs Joy, represented by barrister Mr Daniel Sokol, argued that her ex-husband was not living from hand to mouth and that this latest attempt to avoid paying her spousal maintenance was a continuation of his ‘elaborate charade’.
Mr Joy is also the subject of legal actions in France.
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