C.1. - Introduction:
- The case before me is one of the most outrageous cases I have encountered in all my years on the bench. This is a very wealthy family whose family fortune, estimated by the woman at about $100 million, is held by the man who refuses to share even his share with the woman. In the course of the dozens of hours of discussion I had with the parties, I got the impression that the man had set himself an unparalleled goal, not to pay the woman even a single shekel out of the enormous wealth they had accumulated. This is not a case in which a man holds 100 and is willing for the purposes of a compromise to give up 40 or even 35, but rather my direct and orderly impression of the man, the man believes and believes that through his defense and through the battery of lawyers he has hired, the bottom line will be that the woman deserves nothing.
- Throughout the length, breadth and depth of the proceeding before me, the man repeated as a well-worn mantra the claim that the family capital is actually in the hands of the woman. Between me and myself, I have not the slightest doubt that the man knows very well that no court will heed his argument, and despite this, he adhered to it and repeated it with a clear lack of good faith.
- Whatever the circumstances may be for the separation that was agitated by the parties, nothing can justify such bad faith conduct as the man's conduct in the proceeding before me. Experience shows that even conflicts that open at high intensity calm down a little, and time takes its course. In this case, time did nothing but leave the family fortune in the hands of the man, while excluding the woman from him and his share in it.
- As I will show below, the man's specialty is to take money and place it in tax havens and trusts of one kind or another, so that when the day comes when it is exposed, the man will be able to roll his eyes and say that the money is not in his hands. In this regard, it must be mentioned that the man is considered to be a world-renowned expert in tax havens and trusts whose sole purpose is to conceal the true owner of the capital that resides in them.
- The man concocted a long-term plan to hide the family wealth from the authorities, and after the conflict broke out, from the eyes of the woman and the court. Both sides have "poured" dozens, hundreds and thousands of pages of text to prove each other and the other to prove it, while the law and especially the main principles - common sense and life experience - lead to one district that is inseparable. Distributing the entire family wealth between the parties, without tricks and tricks.
- At the basis of the man's arguments is the claim that the funds are not under his control, although in the hands of trustees who make the funds on their own initiative, while his, the man, has nothing to do with interfering with their judgment. This argument is contrary to all common sense, and those who believe in it will do so at their own risk.
- Is it to be blamed that an intelligent person who does not suffer from serious cognitive problems will hide his fortune in a place where he cannot access? Is it necessary to say that a person will transfer money to trust structures in which he will have no real control? Is it conceivable that a person would be willing to exchange sustainability (living money) and certainty (control of money) in favor of sustainability in doubt and certainty that does not exist at all?!
- I could have asked dozens of similar questions, all of which have the common denominator that if we answer them in the affirmative, we will inevitably lead to a situation of extreme unreasonableness in the man's conduct. In my opinion, the man in front of me is one of the most brilliant people I have met out of the thousands of litigants who have appeared before me, which makes each of the above questions a prominent exclamation point.
- As I will further show below, the man adamantly refused to provide details and refused to allow access to documents and/or information about his property, and in the remainder of his breath, he did not forget to claim that all the property was in the woman's hands. Unfortunately, and it must be said, the degree of trust I placed in the man in the course of the proceeding before me is zero, if not absolute zero. It's not every day that a litigant stands on the witness stand for hours and days and simply tells stories as he likes to be.
- During the cross-examination of the man, I could have been impressed by a very sophisticated man, really brilliant and with extraordinary abilities, but even the defendant, with all his talents, failed to prove his claims and even more failed to confront the facts that were thrown at him. During the years in which the case was conducted before me, I had an unmediated approach to getting an impression of the man and the way he manipulated his answers while dissolving a thick fog, and despite this, a large number of material contradictions were discovered in his testimony, which led me to the conclusion that his testimony was a real testimony, full of lies and attempts to conceal the truth.
- Other Municipality Motions 765/18 Shmuel Hayoun v. Elad Hayoun (published in Nevo, May 1, 2019) The Supreme Court ruled that the lies of a litigant that relate to the matters at the heart of the dispute should alone serve as a basis for rejecting a full statement of claim by the litigant without the need to analyze additional evidence, and as the Supreme Court said: "... It must be enforced with determination, with a hard hand, and in a manner that will deter litigants from giving false testimony and other wrongful acts that constitute an abuse of court proceedings. The correct remedy against the giving of false testimony by a party - when the testimony deals with a material matter for litigation and is given knowingly with the intention of skewing the outcome of the trial - is to give a verdict to the liar's obligation...(ibid., para. 35).
- If this is the law that applies to perjury in a substantive matter, it is not difficult to understand well what the law is when the litigant is constantly lying on many material issues for litigation and in fact lies throughout the entire length, breadth and depth of the proceeding.
- Before we get to the main course and as an appetizer only, I will turn to a single event that illustrates everything else. Thus, when the man was asked in his cross-examination whether he had personally earned a total of $60 million in 2000 as a result of his use of tax havens in the United States (BLIPS), he vehemently denied this:
"The Woman's Counsel: I'm telling you that in addition to these sums, in addition to these sums, you've earned the Blips In 2000 alone, note the question, $60 million. True or false?