The man: I don't remember" (See the minutes of the hearing of November 18, 2020, pp. 683, paras. 24-26 and p. 684, para. 1).
- In addition, Alabama paid expenses related to the private daily life of the entire family, including after-school expenses for the parties' son (see Appendix 45 to the wife's summaries). Alabama also offered Man $2 million bail after his personal involvement in criminal charges. The question will be asked, what interest does a company have - to mention a company that is intended to maximize profits - to provide a personal guarantee in such a significant amount to a person who is not connected to it?! It is clear that there is no need to answer.
- Moreover, when the man's 'private bank' was damaged, according to him, by the Oregon Trust Management Company (hereinafter: the Oregon Fund) - the man filed a personal claim against the Oregon Foundation for Compensation for Damages Caused to the Alabama Company, and indeed the man and the woman signed a settlement agreement with the Oregon Foundation in the framework of the same proceeding, which personally granted them compensation for the damages caused to Alabama (see Appendices 16 and 18 of the Woman's Summaries). In a document prepared for these proceedings, the man himself stated that Alabama had built the residence as a permanent home for the man and his family (see Appendix 37 to the wife's summaries):
"In 2004/2005 Alabama purchases a property in Israel with the intention to build a house for AM's family's permanent living."
And once again, is there a shred of business logic for a company in building a luxurious residential estate that will be rented to a man and his family for a rent of one dollar a year? Not at all.
- In accordance with the picture that clearly emerges from all of the above, when there is an absolute and unique identity between a single shareholder and the company, then the company and the shareholder should be viewed as one individual shareholder, even without lifting the veil (see and compare: Civil Appeal (Tel Aviv District) 1064-01-22 Nimrod Orenstein v. Menad Holdings in Tax Appeal (Nevo, August 30, 2022)).
- In this regard, I will also refer to the judgment of the District Court in the matter of the parties in Family Appeal Authority 68222-10-18 (published in Nevo, January 27, 2019): "The Applicant (Alabama - Y. ) is not a foreign company with worldwide businesses, which is alien to the Respondent (the man - Y. S.), and that holds an esoteric property in Israel that the Respondent (the Woman - Y. S.) She stares at him. This is the home of the parties, a house that was built during the marriage and in which the family lived for a period of about 10 years until the outbreak of the conflict. This is a house of enormous value (according to the respondent about $25 million). From the outset, a different appeal was registered by the applicant. The residence of the couple and their children in the house was arranged according to a contract with the Applicant for a period of 24 years and in exchange for rent, which at this stage has not yet been proven to have ever been paid (see paragraph 17g of the decision of the trial court); The witness on behalf of the Applicant (Ms. Jennifer, the Applicant's director) testified in her cross-examination in court that the company does not hold assets other than the same residence, neither in Israel nor in the entire world, and did not know whether the Applicant held other properties in the past (pp. 46-47 of the minutes of the hearing, attached as Appendix H to the response). Although at this stage it cannot be said that the Respondent was able to prove that the Applicant and the Respondent are one and the same, it was proved before the trial court that there was an identity of interests between the two and that there was an inseparable connection between them. Suffice it to note in this context that the respondent had previously declared that he held 100% of the respondent's shares and had also reported to the tax authorities in the United States (see paragraphs 17a-b of the trial court's decision). The Respondent's explanations that he only has economic-tax ownership in the Applicant and that he holds "ownership for tax purposes" in the Applicant (see the Applicant's reference at paragraphs 100, 104 to the request for leave to appeal and the Respondent's position at paragraphs 15-16 of his response) are arguments that the trial court will have to deal with in the framework of the hearing of the claim" (p. 14 of the judgment, emphases not original).
- Prior to the lockdown, it should be recalled that according to Alabama, the woman claimed in a proceeding between the municipality of... to the parties because the house does not belong to her. At most, there is a declaration by the woman and the man together - through one attorney - to the municipality, a declaration intended to make things easier for them vis-à-vis the municipality. Under these circumstances, a single lack of good faith can be attributed to the woman vis-à-vis the municipality, whereas in the case before me, the man was subjected to a double lack of good faith; Both towards the municipality and - and this is the main thing - towards the woman.
- With these reasons, I reject the man's claim that his ownership in Alabama is purely economic-taxation, and accept the woman's claim that the man is the real owner in Alabama. Accordingly, the only asset owned by the Alabama company, the residence, will be included in the couple's joint property.
- As stated above and for the avoidance of any doubt; The burden of proof in the matter of the residence was and remains on the shoulders of the woman, but the burden of proof shifted to the shoulders of the defendants, who did not meet it and did not even try to meet it. In any event, in view of the cumulative evidence that all leads to the same conclusion, even if the burden of proof had remained on the woman's shoulders, she had met this burden.
- Now that it has been determined that the ownership of the residence is for the parties, I will address the question of the total scope of their joint property , which is subject to division according to the law.
C.2.3 - The joint property of the parties:
- The man's argument throughout the entire length and breadth of the proceeding was that all the remaining family capital (because he claimed that the family had lost its wealth) was actually in the hands of the woman. Bearing in mind that his claim is of the "all or nothing" type, when in his opinion, the woman has everything and he has nothing andnothing. Needless to say, these are claims that have no polarity.
- The man did not present a single document showing the value of the property accumulated by the parties during their marriage, but reiterated that the family had depreciated from its assets over the years. On the other hand, the woman claimed that all the property (which, according to her, and based on documents obtained by the woman with considerable effort, was estimated at about $100 million) actually remained under the control of the man and with his knowledge alone. I mean, he holds the key, but he's also the safe. A real expression of this is found in the fact that the man set up a secure room in the residence, the entrance to which was possible only by means of the man's fingerprint. The man refused to allow any members of the household to enter, and the ban on them entering was strictly enforced by CCTV cameras. This should show the extent to which the woman was physically and tangibly excluded from any contact with information about the parties' property. Accordingly, during the course of the proceeding, the man gave his consent to the court issuing an order for the disclosure of assets and accounts, knowing full well that the order would yield nothing and dust of anything.
- At the beginning of this part of the hearing, I will mention my decision regarding the reversal of the burden of bringing evidence as presented above, which also stands with regard to proving the total scope of the parties' property. During the proceeding before me, and in view of the man's efforts to conceal it, the woman made great efforts to ascertain the extent and location of the family property. On the other hand, the man deliberately, consciously and even deliberately chose not to present evidence to support his claims that the family lost its assets following the criminal proceedings against him in the United States and has not returned to its financial strength since.
- Moreover, the court finds the man's version that the family has not been able to return to financial strength since the criminal proceedings against the man in the United States, while between the end of the criminal proceedings and the date of the rupture between the parties, the parties lived at a high and luxurious standard of living, according to all the data presented to the court (see in this regard my decision in the matter of temporary alimony of June 26, 2017 and the judgment regarding alimony of June 26, 2019). With regard to the man's claim that the funds used by the family, which he claimed deducted from its assets after the legal affair in which he was involved in the United States, during the marital life and until the outbreak of the conflict, were irrevocable trusts and not family property - I found that the man did not show a flow, even of a single dollar, of premarital funds - that is, he did not succeed in 'painting' any amount of money that belonged to him from before the marriage as one that formed the basis for any of the trusts. If that were not enough, the man went on to claim that the woman "benefited from the fact that the property held in the foreign trusts did not belong to me or any of the family members. Thus, for example, despite the proceedings that were conducted against me in the United States, the authorities there did not 'seize' or confiscate this property (a fact that is also sufficient to prove that it is not my property)" (see para. 16 of the man's main testimony affidavit). It is plain that if the property is not the man's property, as he says, how could the woman benefit from it?
- I will reiterate, not for the sake of repetition but for the sake of the importance of the matter, that the real difficulty in locating the family property lies entirely in the fact that the man is a master in terms of his abilities and expertise in creating complex tax planning, which includes sophisticated financial tricks that create virtuoso tax shelters through which it is possible to smuggle property and avoid paying tax to the tax authorities. Even the legal authorities in the United States understood the magnitude of his talent in this field, and this served him in reaching a plea bargain in which he assisted the authorities. Thus, the man's lawyers emphasized his talent in the field and the substance of his assistance to the authorities on May 17, 2010, before the court in the United States before the man's sentence was handed down:
"[The man] made a huge mistake in his life when he got involved in a very serious crime. And given all of his talents and potential, it's really tragic because he has the potential to make an enormous contribution to society, and instead he got involved in serious crimes. But we're here today because [the man] turned a difficult corner. He not only became cooperating witness and assisted the government that your honor saw in the case that went to trial, but his cooperation is ongoing. Just last Thursday [the man] met for several hours on a new tax shelter case that he's assisting the government with."
- In addition, it is known that the man used his name and his family name in various and varied configurations in order to conceal and obscure his identity and traces as he spread his wealth over complex corporate structures around the world. Here are some examples of how the man spelled his name in English in property documents [note - for illustration let's say the man answers to the name Cohen]:
Cohen / Cohenky / Cohenki / Cohenski / Cohensky / Kahan / Kahanky / Kahanki / Kahanski / Kahansky / Kohen / Kohenky / Kohenki / Kohensky/ Kohenski / Kahon/ Kahonki / Kahonky/ Kahonski / Kahonsky
- It is evident that the man has taken advantage of all the possibilities of combinations that can be derived from the letters of his name or the sound of his pronunciation, and while the simple man will ask "why", the wise man will not need an answer. It is superfluous (or not) to note that the man's use of similar names, which makes it difficult to identify him and violates the principles of good faith and transparency, is a pattern of action that has a real fear of misleading, preventing proper factual clarification, and sometimes even concealing identity in order to evade legal liability. This conduct may be considered bad faith conduct, amounting to abuse of various legal proceedings or civil frameworks, and in some cases even as a ploy prohibited by law. Moreover, the repeated use of such close names may be the basis for the claim of a criminal motive or an intention to defraud, depending on the circumstances of the case.
- Similarly, during the course of the proceeding, it was discovered that contrary to the man's sweeping claim that he had no bank accounts, the man managed dozens of bank accounts in Israel and abroad. During the man's interrogation at the beginning of the proceeding, he wrote: "I don't have bank accounts... I can't open an account abroad because of what happened to me in 2005 in America, I mean the criminal charge. No bank will accept me as a signatory to a bank account, and therefore all the management of the funds and all the bank accounts are under the full control of the plaintiff" (see the minutes of the hearing of November 29, 2016, pp. 11, paras. 7 and pp. 13, paras. 11-14).
Later in the process, the man admitted during his interrogation that in the years following the criminal charge, he also had several bank accounts in the United States and England. Thus, he was asked and answered: