Alan Miller: My £5m warning to wealthy husbands (Jewish Chronicle)
Alan Miller, who this week failed in the House of Lords to overturn a landmark divorce settlement, speaks exclusively to David Rowan about the lessons learned from his 'big-money' court battles
It is not every day that a senior City fund manager - one valued in the Sunday Times Rich List at £65 million - calls up to share a few raw confidences about his marital breakdown. But then Alan Miller, joint chief investment officer at New Star Asset Management, has had more than his day job to worry about since separating three years ago from his American-born wife Melissa.
First, there was the much-pored-over divorce settlement which, after a brutal court room battle, left him owing Mrs Miller a legally unprecedented £5 million - £4,935.83 for every day of their childless, two-and-three-quarter-year marriage. Then came the High Court appeal, which confirmed not only the award, but also the earlier judge's decision to assign Miller blame for the marital collapse, a view that appeared to uproot a generation of legal precedent. Finally, there was his appeal to the House of Lords, a last attempt to establish what Miller considered to be justice. He may have failed to overturn the payout when the Law Lords announced their conclusions on Wednesday, but he still has a few things left to get off his chest.
Alan Miller, who insists his Rich List valuation is highly exaggerated, is angry. Yet his concern is addressed not to the ex-wife who rejected an out-of-court settlement that approached £2 million, but at a legal process he claims has treated him arbitrarily, insensitively and with little regard to reason. As he awaited the Lords' ruling clarifying the law on short-marriage "big money" divorces such as his, he approached the JC to express his views, once and for all, before he retreats once more into privacy. He will not, he says, be giving any other interviews.
"I'm very pleased that the House of Lords has ruled that the original judgments in my case were both wrong in law, and that the judges were not in a position to assess conduct, nor should have it been taken into consideration," he says. "They have also now been shown to have been wrong to base their award on my ex-wife's financial expectations at the time of marriage.
"But I am disappointed that, despite these errors, the Law Lords have coincidentally come up with the same £5 million figure! It seems I have been penalised for the high standard of living I gave my wife, and that the Lords have not given enough weight to my long career that pre-dated the marriage during which my earning capacity was built. I believe there should be a fair compensation for the breakdown of a marriage, but surely this should not equate to a meal ticket for life after a short, childless marriage."
Miller, 42, voices his numerous frustrations about a case that he never imagined would even reach court. "It's been horrific," he says calmly. "I entered the whole process thinking there could be a reasoned and sensible settlement between the two of us, but the impression of the system I was left with was one which discourages the parties from talking to each other, driving still greater wedges between them. The interests of the parties become subservient to the massive egos of the solicitors and barristers involved; vitriolic and highly personal letters flow back and forth; and barristers take their wonderful legal points seemingly out of interest in changing the law rather than what is in the best interests of the divorcing couple. The family law system in this country is a shocking disgrace."
A former member of Hampstead Synagogue, who grew up in Hampstead and attended Haberdashers' Aske's, Miller has been a reluctant newsmaker, as concerned to protect his new family from photographers stalking their home as he has been to maintain his judgment at work. He is aware that multi-millionaire fund managers do not generally command public sympathy, a factor exacerbated by some of the efforts made by his ex-wife's team in court to cast doubt on his character. Yet, whether or not he is wise to speak out now, he is determined to have his say. "You think you'll get a fair trial," he reflects. "But to have a court investigating what went on in a marriage - even after the other party has given a High Court undertaking not to discuss such matters - is quite disgraceful. It was deeply upsetting for her [Melissa] and for me in court. The tone and the questions during cross-examination were sick and offensive, and I felt violated. The parties weren't accused of murder, were they?"
The case of Miller vs Miller was no different from thousands of other divorces that are settled quietly out of court but for one detail: the level of wealth involved. For centuries, the English divorce courts awarded wealthy husbands the bulk of the marital fortune once the wife's "reasonable requirements" for living had been met, an imbalance that began shifting only after a Law Lords' ruling six years ago that "equality" should henceforth be the yardstick. But with the law still to be tested in any detail, Miller vs Miller appeared to fall between precedents.
Whereas Melissa Miller, who is not Jewish, gave up her £85,000-a-year job with a pharmaceutical company after marriage to divide her time between the marital Chelsea town house and the villa in the south of France, Alan Miller was earning up to £3 million a year. He banked £20 million following the earlier sale of Jupiter, a previous employer, to Commerzbank, not forgetting his 200,000 shares in his current employer, potentially worth many millions more. Mrs Miller's team wanted the courts to quantify how far she should benefit in her role as non-earning wife. That was clarified finally with the Lords ruling this week.
His legal and associated bills alone have cost Alan Miller considerably more than £500,000, he estimates, and that excludes "a substantial contribution" towards his former wife's costs. That is one reason why he will not, he says, be challenging the ruling in Europe. Yet it has to be said that he chose to pursue the matter both in the appeal court and the Lords, when he could easily have afforded to write a £5 million cheque. Why, then, not simply settle?
"Because it's a principle," he says firmly. "It was analagous to being financially blackmailed. Why should I, when it was based on no law whatsoever, no precedent, and was wholly unfair? I offered her, from the outset, a very large sum - which became £2 million tax free - to avoid going to court. I thought that we could each move forwards. But I got a message back from her lawyers that they were shocked by this ‘derisory' figure. So it became a principle. And I don't regret pursuing it."
The judge in the initial court hearing, Mr Justice Singer, found Miller "largely if not entirely" responsible for the marital breakdown, a factor that boosted his wife's award. This in particular raised concern in legal circles. It seemed to revive the long-abandoned notion that "blame" should be taken into account when determining a financial settlement.
"That was a grave mistake," Miller says now. "It's virtually impossible for anyone outside a marriage to know who was more at fault. The two parties were wholly incompatible - we never lived together prior to marriage and we couldn't live together after marriage. Isn't it better to say it's not working, arrange a reasonable settlement and move on? Yet the Court of Appeal said the husband or wife should be penalised for leaving the marriage unless the other one agrees.
"The law also says that a marriage's duration is a factor, yet both judgments ignored the fact that it was a very short marriage. And in all previous short-marriage cases, there's been a high concentration on what each party brought into the marriage, whereas in this case that was obfuscated. The judge decided that as she had the good fortune to marry a rich man, she should keep the marital home and a high standard of living for the rest of her life, even though she was young, independent, and could remarry and get a highly paid job."
But his greatest concerns, he says, are that the family law courts work to no consistent guidelines, and that those advocating and passing judgment there may be connected socially. "The system can be completely arbitrary depending on which QC faces which judge," he says. "And because matrimonial law is so wide, any judge can say whatever he likes and declare that that was fair. In family law, there also seems to be quite a small club of judges, QCs and senior lawyers. One would have thought that if you were a judge you'd keep yourself pretty separate so you can make impartial decisions. Yet there are seemingly regular drinks parties held at chambers where judges and QCs attend. They're often good friends; some judges' children work in senior positions in family law. In my own case, quite astonishingly, the senior judge in the Court of Appeal was in court with his own son, who was a junior barrister in my case. You may have thought from outside there might appear to be a potentially huge conflict of interests between having father and son in the same courtroom but, in the field of family law, it would seem that anything is possible."
Miller has by no means finished listing his complaints. An onlooker might conclude a certain obsessiveness about his experiences: that the QCs have "got you" so that you cannot negotiate on fees - which for one 90-minute consultation, he says, amounted to around £10,000; that the "farcical" courtroom banter was played out slowly, and at his personal expense; that the initial judge took six months to write his judgment. "It's taken me longer to get through my divorce than to get through my marriage," he says with a bitter laugh. "The marriage lasted two-and-three-quarter years, the divorce a bit more than three!"
He offers some advice to Paul McCartney, now facing a big-money divorce of his own. "My advice is that he should try to come to a reasoned and fair outcome before he has to go through the lengthy and public court process," he says. "The problem in coming to court is the whole process is totally random."
He has now remarried, and lives with his wife and their two children, one of whom he has adopted. "I have a wonderful wife and wonderful family and am really happy," he says. "That's why I don't have any regrets that my old marriage had finished - we were just totally incompatible. You never know until you've lived with someone if you can work together, and unfortunately we couldn't."
So would he advise other wealthy men to remain single? "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned romantic," he says after a pause. "Everybody said to me, you have to be absolutely mad, given what you've gone through, to get married again. But I have no regrets whatsoever. Just make sure you've got the right person.
Alan Miller in brief
Age: 42
Upbringing: Grew up in Hampstead and had his barmitzvah at the Hampstead (United) Synagogue in Dennington Park Road
Education: Haberdashers' Aske's School for Boys, Elstree; studied accountancy at Birmingham University
Career: Became an accountant but, bored, applied successfully to be an investment trainee. Worked at Hermes Investment Management, Gartmore and Jupiter Asset Management before joining New Star in 2001
His Judaism: "I wouldn't describe myself as a religious person. I come from a Jewish family and had a Jewish upbringing but, for me, it's more of a background, a family history, than a belief"
Family: Now remarried, with two children (one adopted)
(The Jewish Chronicle, May 26 2006)
It is not every day that a senior City fund manager - one valued in the Sunday Times Rich List at £65 million - calls up to share a few raw confidences about his marital breakdown. But then Alan Miller, joint chief investment officer at New Star Asset Management, has had more than his day job to worry about since separating three years ago from his American-born wife Melissa.
First, there was the much-pored-over divorce settlement which, after a brutal court room battle, left him owing Mrs Miller a legally unprecedented £5 million - £4,935.83 for every day of their childless, two-and-three-quarter-year marriage. Then came the High Court appeal, which confirmed not only the award, but also the earlier judge's decision to assign Miller blame for the marital collapse, a view that appeared to uproot a generation of legal precedent. Finally, there was his appeal to the House of Lords, a last attempt to establish what Miller considered to be justice. He may have failed to overturn the payout when the Law Lords announced their conclusions on Wednesday, but he still has a few things left to get off his chest.
Alan Miller, who insists his Rich List valuation is highly exaggerated, is angry. Yet his concern is addressed not to the ex-wife who rejected an out-of-court settlement that approached £2 million, but at a legal process he claims has treated him arbitrarily, insensitively and with little regard to reason. As he awaited the Lords' ruling clarifying the law on short-marriage "big money" divorces such as his, he approached the JC to express his views, once and for all, before he retreats once more into privacy. He will not, he says, be giving any other interviews.
"I'm very pleased that the House of Lords has ruled that the original judgments in my case were both wrong in law, and that the judges were not in a position to assess conduct, nor should have it been taken into consideration," he says. "They have also now been shown to have been wrong to base their award on my ex-wife's financial expectations at the time of marriage.
"But I am disappointed that, despite these errors, the Law Lords have coincidentally come up with the same £5 million figure! It seems I have been penalised for the high standard of living I gave my wife, and that the Lords have not given enough weight to my long career that pre-dated the marriage during which my earning capacity was built. I believe there should be a fair compensation for the breakdown of a marriage, but surely this should not equate to a meal ticket for life after a short, childless marriage."
Miller, 42, voices his numerous frustrations about a case that he never imagined would even reach court. "It's been horrific," he says calmly. "I entered the whole process thinking there could be a reasoned and sensible settlement between the two of us, but the impression of the system I was left with was one which discourages the parties from talking to each other, driving still greater wedges between them. The interests of the parties become subservient to the massive egos of the solicitors and barristers involved; vitriolic and highly personal letters flow back and forth; and barristers take their wonderful legal points seemingly out of interest in changing the law rather than what is in the best interests of the divorcing couple. The family law system in this country is a shocking disgrace."
A former member of Hampstead Synagogue, who grew up in Hampstead and attended Haberdashers' Aske's, Miller has been a reluctant newsmaker, as concerned to protect his new family from photographers stalking their home as he has been to maintain his judgment at work. He is aware that multi-millionaire fund managers do not generally command public sympathy, a factor exacerbated by some of the efforts made by his ex-wife's team in court to cast doubt on his character. Yet, whether or not he is wise to speak out now, he is determined to have his say. "You think you'll get a fair trial," he reflects. "But to have a court investigating what went on in a marriage - even after the other party has given a High Court undertaking not to discuss such matters - is quite disgraceful. It was deeply upsetting for her [Melissa] and for me in court. The tone and the questions during cross-examination were sick and offensive, and I felt violated. The parties weren't accused of murder, were they?"
The case of Miller vs Miller was no different from thousands of other divorces that are settled quietly out of court but for one detail: the level of wealth involved. For centuries, the English divorce courts awarded wealthy husbands the bulk of the marital fortune once the wife's "reasonable requirements" for living had been met, an imbalance that began shifting only after a Law Lords' ruling six years ago that "equality" should henceforth be the yardstick. But with the law still to be tested in any detail, Miller vs Miller appeared to fall between precedents.
Whereas Melissa Miller, who is not Jewish, gave up her £85,000-a-year job with a pharmaceutical company after marriage to divide her time between the marital Chelsea town house and the villa in the south of France, Alan Miller was earning up to £3 million a year. He banked £20 million following the earlier sale of Jupiter, a previous employer, to Commerzbank, not forgetting his 200,000 shares in his current employer, potentially worth many millions more. Mrs Miller's team wanted the courts to quantify how far she should benefit in her role as non-earning wife. That was clarified finally with the Lords ruling this week.
His legal and associated bills alone have cost Alan Miller considerably more than £500,000, he estimates, and that excludes "a substantial contribution" towards his former wife's costs. That is one reason why he will not, he says, be challenging the ruling in Europe. Yet it has to be said that he chose to pursue the matter both in the appeal court and the Lords, when he could easily have afforded to write a £5 million cheque. Why, then, not simply settle?
"Because it's a principle," he says firmly. "It was analagous to being financially blackmailed. Why should I, when it was based on no law whatsoever, no precedent, and was wholly unfair? I offered her, from the outset, a very large sum - which became £2 million tax free - to avoid going to court. I thought that we could each move forwards. But I got a message back from her lawyers that they were shocked by this ‘derisory' figure. So it became a principle. And I don't regret pursuing it."
The judge in the initial court hearing, Mr Justice Singer, found Miller "largely if not entirely" responsible for the marital breakdown, a factor that boosted his wife's award. This in particular raised concern in legal circles. It seemed to revive the long-abandoned notion that "blame" should be taken into account when determining a financial settlement.
"That was a grave mistake," Miller says now. "It's virtually impossible for anyone outside a marriage to know who was more at fault. The two parties were wholly incompatible - we never lived together prior to marriage and we couldn't live together after marriage. Isn't it better to say it's not working, arrange a reasonable settlement and move on? Yet the Court of Appeal said the husband or wife should be penalised for leaving the marriage unless the other one agrees.
"The law also says that a marriage's duration is a factor, yet both judgments ignored the fact that it was a very short marriage. And in all previous short-marriage cases, there's been a high concentration on what each party brought into the marriage, whereas in this case that was obfuscated. The judge decided that as she had the good fortune to marry a rich man, she should keep the marital home and a high standard of living for the rest of her life, even though she was young, independent, and could remarry and get a highly paid job."
But his greatest concerns, he says, are that the family law courts work to no consistent guidelines, and that those advocating and passing judgment there may be connected socially. "The system can be completely arbitrary depending on which QC faces which judge," he says. "And because matrimonial law is so wide, any judge can say whatever he likes and declare that that was fair. In family law, there also seems to be quite a small club of judges, QCs and senior lawyers. One would have thought that if you were a judge you'd keep yourself pretty separate so you can make impartial decisions. Yet there are seemingly regular drinks parties held at chambers where judges and QCs attend. They're often good friends; some judges' children work in senior positions in family law. In my own case, quite astonishingly, the senior judge in the Court of Appeal was in court with his own son, who was a junior barrister in my case. You may have thought from outside there might appear to be a potentially huge conflict of interests between having father and son in the same courtroom but, in the field of family law, it would seem that anything is possible."
Miller has by no means finished listing his complaints. An onlooker might conclude a certain obsessiveness about his experiences: that the QCs have "got you" so that you cannot negotiate on fees - which for one 90-minute consultation, he says, amounted to around £10,000; that the "farcical" courtroom banter was played out slowly, and at his personal expense; that the initial judge took six months to write his judgment. "It's taken me longer to get through my divorce than to get through my marriage," he says with a bitter laugh. "The marriage lasted two-and-three-quarter years, the divorce a bit more than three!"
He offers some advice to Paul McCartney, now facing a big-money divorce of his own. "My advice is that he should try to come to a reasoned and fair outcome before he has to go through the lengthy and public court process," he says. "The problem in coming to court is the whole process is totally random."
He has now remarried, and lives with his wife and their two children, one of whom he has adopted. "I have a wonderful wife and wonderful family and am really happy," he says. "That's why I don't have any regrets that my old marriage had finished - we were just totally incompatible. You never know until you've lived with someone if you can work together, and unfortunately we couldn't."
So would he advise other wealthy men to remain single? "I suppose I'm an old-fashioned romantic," he says after a pause. "Everybody said to me, you have to be absolutely mad, given what you've gone through, to get married again. But I have no regrets whatsoever. Just make sure you've got the right person.
Alan Miller in brief
Age: 42
Upbringing: Grew up in Hampstead and had his barmitzvah at the Hampstead (United) Synagogue in Dennington Park Road
Education: Haberdashers' Aske's School for Boys, Elstree; studied accountancy at Birmingham University
Career: Became an accountant but, bored, applied successfully to be an investment trainee. Worked at Hermes Investment Management, Gartmore and Jupiter Asset Management before joining New Star in 2001
His Judaism: "I wouldn't describe myself as a religious person. I come from a Jewish family and had a Jewish upbringing but, for me, it's more of a background, a family history, than a belief"
Family: Now remarried, with two children (one adopted)
(The Jewish Chronicle, May 26 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, May 26, 2006
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