Investment banker-turned-Oxford researcher loses out on millions

They were, it might have seemed, made for each other: the beautiful daughter and heiress of a German paper magnate, and the young investment banker, himself the son of a wealthy French industrialist. But when Katrin Radmacher and Nicolas Granatino fell in love and decided to marry in 1998, neither she – nor her father – were prepared to take any chances with her estimated £150m fortune. Granatino was prevailed upon to sign a prenuptial contract in which he agreed not to make a claim against his wife should they split up.

Eight years and two children later, however, marital bliss had soured, and the couple divorced. But though the prenup would have been binding in either of the couple’s home countries, they had met, married and divorced in London. Knowing that English law did not recognise prenuptial agreements, Granatino, 38, claimed for millions, confident that the contract would be deemed worthless.

Today, that claim was the subject of a dramatic landmark judgment at the court of appeal, after three judges gave the clearest ruling to date that prenups can be “decisive” when settling divorce cases in England. It means that despite his wife’s enormous assets, and an earlier high court award totalling £5.6m that would have given him an income of £100,000 a year for life, Granatino will now receive a much smaller amount, yet to be determined, and a loan for a house that he must return after the younger of the couple’s two daughters, who is now six, reaches the age of 22.

The ruling is all the more striking given that Granatino has given up his banking career to work as a £30,000-a-year biotechnology researcher at Oxford University. Radmacher, 39, said that if her ex-husband “wishes to be an academic he must live as such”.

Radmacher’s solicitor, Ayesha Vardag, said after the ruling: “The court of appeal, in a carefully reasoned, thoroughly modern judgment, has enabled English matrimonial law to catch up with the rest of the world. From today, grown-ups can agree in the best of times what will happen in the worst of times.”

Granatino may believe differently: his solicitors indicated that he would be seeking permission to appeal to the House of Lords.

Legal observers agreed that the ruling confirmed a marked shift in British divorce courts. Nicola Harries, a partner in the family solicitors Stevens & Bolton, said the ruling was “a staggering decision” given the ages of their children. “It is hard to square this decision with the duty of the English court to give first consideration to the welfare of the children – the disparity in lifestyle that the children will experience between their parents’ homes will be stark, to say the least.” Family lawyers, she added, “will need to hurriedly reassess the standard advice they have given about prenups.”

Emma Hatley, a divorce specialist and partner at Stewarts Law, said it would now be “foolhardy” for those signing a prenup to assume they would not be held to it, “regardless of whether, as many still believe, it is an immoral bargain. They must think very carefully … on the rights they are potentially giving up.”

Granatino and Radmacher were in their late 20s when they met at Tramp nightclub in Mayfair in 1998. Radmacher – who is worth more than £54m, with a further estimated £100m inheritance – was running a boutique in Knightsbridge, while her husband-to-be worked for the investment bank JP Morgan. His father Antoine, a former vice-president at IBM, has a fortune of his own and now lives in London.

In a statement yesterday, Radmacher said: “When we met and married, Nicolas and I were broadly on an equal footing financially. He too is an heir to a multimillion pound fortune and when we met was an investment banker earning up to £330,000 a year.

“The agreement was at my father’s insistence as he wanted to protect my inheritance – this is perfectly normal in our countries of origin. My father taught me the value of hard work and family values. Like all wealthy parents, he feared gold diggers. As an heir himself, Nicolas perfectly understood this. The agreement gave me reassurance … that we were marrying for the right reasons.”

Her decision to appeal against the high court’s ruling last year to award her husband a much more substantial sum was because of “what I regard as a broken promise”, she said.

Granatino, however, who was represented by Paul McCartney’s former divorce lawyers Fiona Shackleton and Nicholas Mostyn QC, argued that he had not had independent legal advice before signing, and that his former wife had not disclosed the full extent of her assets.

In his judgment, Lord Justice Thorpe said it had become “increasingly unrealistic” to view prenups as void, a position which, he said, “reflects the laws and morals of earlier generations” rather than those of “an age when marriage is not generally regarded as a sacrament and divorce is a statistical commonplace”.