XIM v XIN

Facts

The parties married in Singapore on 2 October 2011, each for the second time, and had no children together. The wife filed for divorce on 16 January 2023. In 2009 the husband had set up a construction company with a friend, each holding half. On 19 May 2015 he transferred all 250,000 of his shares to his elder son, then a 23-year-old university student, for a stated price of $150,000, although he stayed on as a director until 2018.

In the ancillary matters, the District Judge found that this transfer at an undervalue was a dissipation of matrimonial assets. Of the shares, 175,000 had been acquired during the marriage, worth $251,874.70 at the time of transfer. The judge valued them as at May 2015, deducted the $150,000 said to have been paid by the son, added the balance back to the matrimonial pool, and divided the assets 75:25 in the husband's favour. The wife appealed in District Court Appeal No 108 of 2024. She argued that the shares should be valued at a date close to the hearing, when she put their value at $1,351,000, and that the $150,000 should not have been deducted.

Issues

1. Whether dissipated company shares should be valued at the date of the transfer or at a date close to the ancillary matters hearing.
2. Whether the $150,000 said to have been paid by the son should be deducted from the value added back to the matrimonial pool.

Holding

Choo Han Teck J allowed the appeal in part. The May 2015 valuation was upheld, but the $150,000 was not deducted, so the full $251,874.70 was added back to the pool of matrimonial assets. No order was made as to costs.

Reasoning

On the valuation date, the judge distinguished the cases the wife relied on, Shih Ching Chia James v Swee Tuan Kay [2002] SGCA 2 and WJG v WJH [2022] SGHCF 28, where assets were dissipated during or shortly before divorce proceedings. Here the transfer took place eight years before the divorce, and the couple went on living as husband and wife, travelling together in 2017 and 2019. The decision to depart from the usual valuation date is not limited to asking whether the wife would be prejudiced; the court looks at all the circumstances. The company's growth after 2015 most likely came from business decisions and market conditions after the husband left, and there was no evidence that he kept control of the company or benefited from it. Valuing the shares at 2023 would pretend he had remained a shareholder, so the District Judge was right that this would be artificial and unfair to him.

On the deduction, the judge took a different view from the District Judge. The only evidence of payment was an image of a cheque from the son's small business dated nine days after the transfer, with no proof it was ever presented. There were no records of that business's profits, it had stopped operating in 2018, and the husband offered no proof of the bank's policy on keeping old records. His staying on as a director also raised doubts about the transaction. The burden of proving that the price was actually paid lay on him, and he had not met it.

From the judgment