Declared that the business was in trouble, but forgot to mention the penthouse
The Jerusalem Family Court rejected the woman's request to cancel the prenuptial agreement, but ruled that the husband must balance with her a luxury apartment he had hidden: "A gift transaction that did not reflect reality."
A couple who married at the end of 2003 and had two children together signed a prenuptial agreement in March 2018, which received the force of a court judgment and established full separation of property between them. Less than a year and a half later, in July 2019, the woman, through attorney Avraham Atias, filed a lawsuit to cancel the entire agreement. According to her, her husband presented a false picture regarding the state of his businesses, hid from her a bank account in the USA with almost 400 thousand dollars, a warehouse, a cottage apartment, and a penthouse, and acted in bad faith, which justifies dismantling the entire agreement and redistributing the property.
Judge Moshe Braun, in a recently issued ruling, rejected most of the claims, but accepted one of them, ruling that the woman is entitled to half the value of a penthouse apartment in Jerusalem. The judge began by recalling the basic legal principle: a prenuptial agreement approved by a court is not an ordinary contract. The judicial approval mechanism is intended to ensure free will and finality of intent, and therefore, as noted in the ruling, it is a deep-rooted and well-known principle that cases where an approved prenuptial agreement that has received the force of a court judgment can be canceled are extremely rare. The burden of proof, which lies on the plaintiff, is particularly high. Accordingly, almost all of the woman's claims were examined against this high threshold — and most of them did not pass it.
Regarding the husband's design company, which was valued by an actuary at approximately 1.226 million shekels, the woman claimed she was misled that the business was in debt. However, in the minutes of the hearing to approve the agreement from 2018, the woman herself is quoted as saying: "I understand that there is a situation where his company is worth more and it is possible that the agreement expresses a greater waiver on my part, and I have no problem with that." The judge ruled that this statement completely undermines the claim, and added that the woman could have checked the company's data herself and chose not to do so.
The claim regarding the bank account in the USA, where about 399,989 dollars were found near the time of the agreement's approval, was also rejected. The husband presented a WhatsApp correspondence from 2017 — about ten months before the signing — in which the woman herself sends him an account statement showing a balance of about 300 thousand dollars. The judge ruled that concealment was not proven, and that even if he had accepted her version that she forgot about the account, this is not enough to lead to the cancellation of the prenuptial agreement. In the same way, the claims regarding a business warehouse in a certain city and a cottage apartment in Beit Shemesh were rejected, as in both cases it was determined that the woman did not meet the burden of proving concealment that creates grounds for cancellation.
The situation turned around when it came to the penthouse apartment in Jerusalem: a property that includes an attached roof for construction, the value of which was estimated by the parties themselves at between 3.5 and 4.5 million shekels. Here, the husband himself admitted that he did not disclose the existence of the apartment at the time of the agreement's approval, but claimed that he received it as a gift from his parents, and therefore it is not subject to balancing at all. Such an admission, alongside a claim of exemption, activates the "admission and avoidance" rule, which shifts the full burden of proof onto the husband's shoulders — and here he failed.
The evidence presented by the woman eroded the gift version: a transcript of a conversation in which the husband's father explicitly admits that he sold the apartment to his son five years ago, and a recording of the husband himself saying, "I paid more for it, even in the deal I made," alongside an alleged payment of 100 thousand dollars for the roof rights. The judge also pointed out that the parents, who have 12 children, refrained from testifying — conduct that created, according to him, an evidentiary presumption against the husband: "The defendant's avoidance of summoning his parents to testify is extremely suspicious." The economic logic itself was also puzzling: no convincing explanation was given for giving the parents' only apartment to the defendant as a gift, when they themselves live in rented accommodation. The judge concluded sharply: "The alleged gift transaction did not reflect reality and cannot be relied upon."
In the end, the cancellation lawsuit was rejected in its entirety, and the agreement remained in force. But the husband was ordered to pay the woman half the value of the penthouse apartment, estimated at the time of the agreement's approval — March 15, 2018 — plus linkage differentials and interest until actual payment. In addition, the husband was ordered to pay legal expenses and attorney's fees in a total amount of 40 thousand shekels. A prenuptial agreement approved by a court is not easily canceled, but it also does not serve as an umbrella for assets that were not explicitly mentioned in it — no mention, no waiver. Anyone who chooses to hide an asset under a gift version will find that once the parents refrain from testifying and the recordings speak for themselves, the family secret becomes particularly expensive.
