source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/oligarch-s-ex-wife-sues-him-for-5bn-gcf79r02l

The former wife of a Russian oligarch is heading for the London courts to try to secure what experts predict could be a “stratospheric” settlement that would cement the UK’s reputation as the country in which the ultra-rich choose to have their divorce cases heard.

Natalia Potanina, who says she is now exiled in Britain, is seeking about £5 billion — half the estimated fortune of Vladimir Potanin, who was once Russia’s richest man.

Such a payout would dwarf all previous settlements in the British divorce courts. In 2014 the estranged wife of Sir Chris Hohn, a City financier, secured a £337 million settlement. The wife of the late Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch, is said to have accepted a deal of between £165 million and £220 million.

Mr Potanin, chairman and president of the Interros conglomerate, is worth $13.5 billion, (£9 billion) according to Forbes magazine. He is now Russia’s fourth richest man and is the 78th richest person in the world.

The couple, who were together for more than 30 years, had a mansion near Moscow and holidayed in Antibes or on one of the couple’s yachts in the Mediterranean.

In late 2013 Mr Potanin told her that he wanted to end their marriage. He had been having an affair with a junior employee.

In 2014 Mr Potanin married his new partner, Katya, with whom he now has two small children. But the first Mrs Potanina declined to sign the divorce papers and is seeking half his fortune. It was accrued, she pointed out, after they met and fell in love as penniless students in Russia in the 1970s.

In 2014 a divorce court in Moscow ruled that Mr Potanin had few assets. Natalia Potanina, who alleges that his fortune is hidden behind complex corporate structures, is appealing to Russia’s supreme court. If that fails, the next step is likely to be the courts in London, a favoured forum for Russians with financial and matrimonial disputes.

Mrs Potanina, who lives in a three-bedroom flat in Westminster, says that she is effectively an exile and unable to return to Russia, where she would have to pay an outstanding “artificial debt” of $1 billion, she told The Guardian.

Mr Potanin is known across Russia as the co-owner of Norilsk Nickel, a Russian mining company. In court he successfully argued that the real owner was an obscure company in Cyprus.

Georgina Hamblin, director of Vardags, one of Britain’s top divorce firms, said that the English courts would not tolerate individuals “forum shopping” to find the most sympathetic jurisdiction and that Mrs Potanina would have to show that she had put down roots in London.

“To establish the necessary jurisdiction to divorce your spouse in England, or indeed to seek more money from a spouse following a foreign divorce, an applicant will have to evidence strong ties to England,” she said.

If Mrs Potanina can show that, she could be successful in a plea to the English courts to seek to combat any unfairness she claims to have suffered at the hands of the Russian court, Ms Hamblin added. “If, once all of this has been considered, she is able to secure 50 per cent of the matrimonial pot — something which may still be achievable in England following a foreign divorce — the amount that she stands to receive will be stratospheric.

“Indeed, if she secures the £5 billion to which she refers this will be the largest award ever made in England, both in terms of a first-instance divorce award and certainly off the back of a foreign divorce.”

However, Marilyn Stowe, senior partner of Stowe Family Law, a leading divorce practice, warned that the case could cost Mrs Potanina dear because she would then have to enforce the order. “That may prove impossible,” she added. “Courts do not have unlimited powers to extract billions from a Russian oligarch and his myriad of Russian companies if they don’t play ball,” Mrs Stowe said.