A cheating husband who gave his girlfriend R610,000 in an attempt to hide it from his wife in an event that they divorce, failed to get his money back after the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg ruled against him.
The parties cannot be named because of the Divorce Act.
However, court papers say that HW is married in community of property to JW.
In 2015, HW began an extramarital affair with RS.
In 2017, HW made three withdrawals in amount of over R850,000 from investment account.
The money was kept in RS’s bedroom and after a while he, gave her R610,000 and kept the rest to himself.
He said he withdrew the money to prevent his wife from obtaining it in divorce proceedings he was at that time intending to pursue against her.
Along the way, his relationship with RS became turbulent and they went their separate ways. After the failure of the relationship, he demanded a repayment of the money saying it was a loan.
He said it was a loan, advanced in two payments – one of R210,000 and another of R400,000.
After realising that he won’t get the funds, he approached the high court and had to join the wife in suing the girlfriend by virtue of their marriage in community of property.
However, the girlfriend insisted that it was a donation to help her wind up her business which was at the time struggling to pay its debts.
She said she wanted to close the business and return to work as a salaried employee because she realised that running a business was stressful.
In addition, she said she also expected HW to follow through on his promise to divorce JW, again, she considered the money as a sign that he would leave his wife and devote himself exclusively to her.
In his defence, the husband said that he did intend to leave his wife, but he had not finally decided whether to enter a permanent and exclusive relationship with RS, he said he wanted to “wait and see” what happened with the divorce.
After listening to both arguments, judge Stuart David James Wilson said the husband made no contemporaneous notes to record the fact of the loan and he told no-one about it.
“There are no contemporaneous letters or emails that refer to the existence of a loan. There were no witnesses to the transaction,” said the judge.
Judge Wilson said he had serious doubts about the husband’s credibility and reliability because at the heart of his case, was an act of dishonesty as his intention was to scheme money away from his wife.
“All he needed to do to achieve that result was move the money to a secret account, or into an undisclosed investment. That would have been no less dishonest than what he actually did,” he said.
Furthermore, the judge said the fact that the money was deposited into RS’s business account rather than into her personal account sits uncomfortably with HW’s version that he did not intend the money to go anywhere near the business.
“The money ended up in the close corporation’s account tends to corroborate RS’s version that the amounts were really donations to the close corporation, meant to pay its debts, and to free RS of the burden the business placed on her,” said the judge.
Judge Wilson said the husband failed to prove his case and he ruled in favour of RS.
IOL