Henry Hood comments on how high-net-worth spouses are using crypto assets in the midst of a divorce in Tatler

Henry Hood’s comments were published in Tatler, 19 October 2022, and the full article can be found here. This article was syndicated in TechTelegraph and can be found here. 

Crypto is being dubbed the new ‘Cayman Islands bank account’ for wealthy spouses attempting to hide money in the midst of a divorce.

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have become increasingly popular among High-Net-Worth spouses because they are held in a ‘digital wallet’ with transactions proving trickier to link back to an individual. For those about to begin divorce proceedings, they can be a cunning way to conceal wealth.

Henry Hood, Senior Partner at Hunters Law, suggests using asset tracers in some cases but warns ‘proportionality always needs to be considered the cost of searching for crypto assets can be high, so whether this is worth it will depend on how confident the client is that the assets exist and their likely scale, especially if it is suspected that their format or location means it will be hard to enforce any orders against them.’

Hood adds: ‘If there is good evidence that the other party does or did have crypto assets and has not disclosed them, the court can be asked to make adverse inferences and award a greater proportion of the non-crypto assets to the other party.’