Background
Natalia Potanina and Vladimir Potanin married in 1983 in Russia. They had met at a young age when studying, at a time neither had any significant wealth. Three children and thirty-one years later, the two were divorced, with Mr. Potanin having amassed a fortune which put him amongst the richest men in the world, let alone Russia, in that time. Forbes in 2014 (the year of the divorce) estimated Mr. Potanin’s wealth as $14.8 billion. In 2025, it is estimated to be closer to $24.2 billion.
Despite this, the Russian courts only awarded Mrs. Potanina roughly $41 million in settlement of her financial claims on divorce. Dissatisfied with this sum, Mrs. Potanina now seeks what may be an award of roughly $6 billion from the courts in England and Wales, an amount which would dwarf the next highest financial remedy award ever seen in our courts. After the judgment of the Court of Appeal in Potanina v Potanin (No.2) [2025] EWCA Civ 1136, she has been granted leave to bring such a claim – but does this spell an opening of the floodgates for not only “divorce tourism” but “post-divorce top up tourism” in the English courts?
The Law
Under Part III of the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984 (MFPA), the English courts can grant permission for an application for an order for financial relief where a marriage has been dissolved or annulled overseas. There must be a “substantial ground” for making the application for permission, and before making any subsequent order for financial relief the court must consider several factors, including but not limited to: the connections the parties have with England and Wales; the financial benefits the parties have or are likely to receive by an order in another country; whether an English order would likely be enforceable and; the length of time since the divorce or annulment.
The Judgment in Potanina v Potanin (No.2)
The issue of the extent of Mrs. Potanina’s (parties hereafter called H and W) connection to England and Wales was indeed one of the key factors in the recent judgment. The key point in the case is that W had little to no connection to England at the time she divorced in 2014 in Russia. W had obtained a UK investor visa in 2014, and purchased a property in London later that year. She had been habitually resident in England, it was agreed, since January 2016 at the latest, and did not make her initial application under Part III until October 2018.
Mr Justice Cohen, in his original judgment in January 2019, had assessed W’s connection with England as “recent and modest” – it was his view that her background and married life were “firmly fixed in her home country” of Russia. Cohen took a dim view of W’s motivation for moving to England, suspecting it to be in order to pursue a financial remedy claim – with particular focus on a visit she had made to matrimonial solicitors in London in 2014, for which she did not disclose an attendance note. He stated that to allow W’s claim to proceed would place no limits on so-called “divorce tourism”, plainly against the established principle that Part III should not be used to top-up a foreign award, or as it were to seek a second bite of the cherry.
It is perhaps understandable how in a vacuum one might question how a spouse who spent her entire thirty-one year married life living in Russia, raised her children in Russia, and whose husband built his entire fortune from Russia, might then make a financial claim in England having only obtained her UK investor visa the year she was divorced, and moving to England two years later.
This was not the view taken by Lord Justice Cobb, who in the recent Court of Appeal judgment in Potanina v Potanin (No.2), emphasised that the issues of “substantial ground” and “connection” were to be taken at the date of the hearing of the application for permission – even with one eye on the likely position at the date of a future substantive hearing. Describing W’s connection as “recent and modest”, then, failed to take proper account of the five years that W would have held her visa, and only slightly shorter period she would have owned her property for, by this point. Cobb did not disagree that historically W’s connections to Russia may have been greater than those to England, but was convinced of proper cause to believe that by the date of the initial hearing of W’s application for permission in 2019, that situation had materially changed. Cobb also took the view that Cohen’s rather unforgiving perception of W’s motivation for moving to England was in large part based on inference drawn from her visit to London matrimonial lawyers in 2014, which was an adverse inference that he was not entitled to draw.
Perhaps most interestingly as regards the balance to be struck in allowing relief under Part III whilst not allowing excessive relitigation of foreign awards was Cobb’s finding that injustice to one party, whilst not a precondition, could be relevant in a Part III claim, and that Cohen had here not sufficiently addressed the injustice of the Russian award. In the circumstances it was clearly agreed that the Russian award was a relative pittance next to what an English order might have awarded W – this owed to what W called a “lacuna” in the Russian Family Code whereby the vast majority of H’s fortune was beneficially owned, rather than in his own name, and was not accounted for in distribution on this basis. The courts of England and Wales, of course, draw no such distinction. Cobb was of the view that Cohen had not properly dealt with this so-called “lacuna”, nor the injustice which might result from the Russian award, in refusing to grant leave.
What now?
It does not seem unfair to predict that with this Judgment the proverbial floodgates are certainly more open for those unsatisfied with a foreign award to bring proceedings in the English courts, even where they had minimal connection to the UK during their marriage. This, too, undoubtedly comes at a time when the family courts are stretched thin as it stands – with the recent announcement by the President of the Family Division of the reduction in sitting days and “doubling up” of hearings in the London Financial Remedies Court, there may well be some healthy scepticism as to the devotion of significant amounts of court time to hearing complex applications for permission to bring a Part III claim in respect of marriages in which both parties might have lived their entire married lives outside of England and Wales. This scepticism will only have been increased by the news that H has now lodged for permission to appeal the decision in Potanina v Potanin (No.2), potentially dragging on the saga yet further in a case where the parties have now been divorced for over a decade. The counter-argument might be that cases as complex (or high-value) as this do not come around often, and that the English courts were clearly an attractive forum given the jurisdiction under Part III even before this judgment. There can be little doubt that after it, they will continue to be so.
