Fictitious and ineffective divorces – beware!
One of the spouses runs a private business that he also owns. In order to establish it, he took out loans from the bank against collateral and a personal guarantee. Later, the family expanded. Two children were born. They needed to move to a spacious apartment, for which they took out a mortgage.
In contrast to the family, the business has fallen into a severe crisis. The harassment has returned. Suppliers have pressed. The banks have limited the credit limit and later turned off the tap. The creditors are not giving up on their debt. The couple knows what awaits them. They want to protect the little property they have left and the savings they have accumulated for the children’s future.
What do we do? They decide to divorce on paper and in practice continue to live as usual but modestly, almost secretly and without unnecessary noise that would reveal the secret of the fiction.
The property is transferred to the wife and children. An agreement is signed for an extremely high payment for alimony that a creditor cannot touch. Thus, they manage to avoid foreclosures and collection companies, under the auspices of Divorce Agreement fictive.
The courts and tribunals do not know the motive underlying the divorce agreement that was brought to their approval for validation. On the face of it, a fictitious divorce agreement, which is not intended to be implemented in practice, is like any other legal agreement. Wherever and in whatever circumstances it is required to be presented, it will be accepted as a legal and valid document.
The fiction is known to the couple, who create it for clear and illegal reasons and do everything possible to hide it.
Why do people choose the fictitious divorce route?
Reality shows that fictitious divorces are especially common among businessmen who have fallen into debt and are facing Raid leg. They look for creative ways to transfer their property and money to others in order to hide their property from creditors.
One way is through a fictitious agreement that is particularly generous toward the wife and children. The debtor husband agrees, ostensibly, to transfer his rights in the joint assets to the wife and children, who become the human protector against the debtor.
In this type of agreement, there is a deliberate inflating of child support payments and related needs of the young children, whose needs grow and become more expensive over the years.
To strengthen the credibility of that fictitious agreement, the couple can also issue Agreement Finance A fictitious one prepared ad hoc due to the special circumstances under which the divorce agreement was also drawn up.
The timing in this case is critical. If the couple hesitated and the creditors were more agile and the Enforcement Bureau began foreclosure proceedings, then there is no point in a fictitious agreement that transfers assets to the wife, in order to escape an expected foreclosure. It is already too late.
The desire to receive benefits from National Insurance that are due to a single parent is also a motive for drawing up a fictitious divorce agreement. These benefits include a child allowance, a once-a-year tuition grant for children attending school, a discount for the mother in public daycare, and the Ministry of Housing’s participation in the rent for three years, if the mother does not own an apartment or part of an apartment.
Also, a woman who is a single parent receives an additional credit point and a man who is a single parent receives an additional credit point plus a credit point for each child. Profitable. But illegal. This is an example of conspiring to defraud in order to fraudulently obtain funds from the state.
What do we do when the fiction is exposed?
When the property is not registered in your name as a debtor but is still yours by virtue of the fictitious agreement you made with your partner, who is an accomplice in a crime, and the creditors cannot seize it, there is no better situation than this.
That’s true, but not always. Life is stronger than any planning and malicious intent. The bubble of lies bursts inside from completely unexpected directions.
If later in life, the couple truly decide to separate, the party in whose name the property is registered will actually receive it, and the man, who transferred the property he accumulated to his wife’s name, will be left without it.
In this way, he cannot claim his share of the property registered in her name because he already gave it to her during the fictitious divorce. Even if his wife is considerate and transfers assets to him that will be registered in his name, creditors may reveal the move and claim their debt, and the husband does not want that. This is the catch.
A situation could certainly arise in which, during their life together under the guise of a fictitious divorce, the woman will fall in love with another man and decide to separate from the indebted husband in favor of a new man who is debt-free.
She can demand that the husband, who supposedly gave up his rights in the shared apartment, which is now registered only in the wife’s name, leave immediately and allow her and her new partner to live together in the property that was once his. If in the past the creditors forced him to smuggle assets out for his wife’s benefit, this time, the same woman drove him out of his house.
The children will have something to say one day, too. What they say will not please their father, who decided with the mother to transfer the apartment to the children’s names in equal shares, or in the case of an only child, only in his name.
The children grew up and decided in one fell swoop to sell their parents’ apartment, which was registered in their names, and to enjoy the fruits of it in exchange for realizing their personal plans. The parents who chose fictitious proceedings will have no legal remedy to prevent the move. They are left to beg for their lives that the children will leave them a roof over their heads.
The court’s position on divorce at first sight…
Creditors do not give up easily when they have reason to suspect that the divorce is a sham and is intended as a sophisticated escape from paying the debt. In this case, you can hire the services of Office Investigations Privacy. Monitor the couple’s behavior and collect evidence and proof of the attempted fraud.
If it is proven that the couple is living together in every respect as if they had not divorced, there is room for lawyer, to challenge the agreement and claim the debt through the courts. But from here to conclusive proof of the fiction and the return of the assets to the true debtor’s owner is still a long and exhausting road. Not every creditor has the patience and means to fight back to prove his right.
There are quite a few cases in which the courts do not accept claims by creditors that assets registered in the name of the divorced woman belong to the debtor husband and the transfer was made as part of a fictitious divorce. This is what happened in the case HP 8559-10-09 Naim N Naim and others Before the Central District Court.
The Naim couple signed a divorce agreement that settled a long list of issues related to the matter. The Geth, for children and property matters. Among other things, the agreement stipulated that the woman would be granted full ownership of two properties: a residential apartment in Holon, where she lives with her two children, and a warehouse that was previously used for the woman’s business.
The agreement received the force of a judgment within the framework of Home Rabbinic Law. The husband’s financial situation is very bad and legal proceedings are underway between him and his creditors. The wife asks the court to determine that the above assets are hers alone so that the creditors will not have the right to claim them as part of her husband’s debts. The creditors claim that the assets were transferred to her name as part of a fictitious divorce agreement.
The court accepted the woman’s claim and determined that, on a principled level, the lack of a proper legal arrangement for the question of the debtor’s spouse status is a deficiency that requires thorough attention from the legislature.
The question of whether the divorce agreement is a fictitious agreement is a question of fact, which requires proof. The court was impressed by the testimonies and documents that the divorce agreement is not fictitious. This is a divorce agreement that was approved by the Rabbinical Court, and a certificate was even presented to the court. Divorce Indicating that the parties have effectively divorced.
In this situation, the evidence required to prove that the divorce act taken by the parties is fictitious must be substantial. The creditors have presented inadmissible hearsay evidence. The examination of the spouses did not leave the court with the impression that this is a fictitious divorce. The fact that spouses treat each other with understanding and consideration does not indicate fiction.
In another case that reached the Supreme Court when it sat as High Court Justice in the case 4479/06, and Gadi Shakir, a resident of Jordan, married Hala Shakir, a resident of Israel. By virtue of his marriage and family unification, he requested that the Ministry of the Interior grant him Israeli citizenship. The Ministry of the Interior objected.
The applicant appealed and the court dismissed his appeal on the grounds that he had multiple wives to whom he was illegally married. The applicant claimed that he was divorced from one and married only to the second. The court was impressed that the alleged divorce was fictitious and that in reality the applicant had two relationships with two women at the same time. The decision was based on High Court 5185/02 Abu Aish v. Minister of the Interior.
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In what cases do couples choose to go in the direction of a fictitious divorce? What does this mean legally? What is the court’s position on the issue of a divorce of convenience and what could be the result of such a fictitious agreement?
