• Mona Nygaard* won a Family Court case for her share of relationship property.
• Her ex-husband, Oscar Nygaard*, appealed but the High Court dismissed it and upheld his former wife’s cross-appeal.
• The High Court decision has left him having to pay slightly more in compensation.

A woman forced to fight her ex over the division of relationship property once worth millions of dollars, says two rounds in court felt like walking into quicksand, which pulled her under and threatened to drown her.

The success Mona Nygaard* achieved earlier in the Family Court was short-lived, when soon afterwards, her ex-husband Oscar Nygaard* appealed the decision that left him with less than $100,000 of the multimillions they once held in the home and the value of their company.

But he has been left no better off after the High Court dismissed the appeal last month and allowed his ex-wife’s cross-appeal.

Mona Nygaard told NZME she had no words to describe what she had been through and the resilience it had taken to fight.

“I don’t even know how to describe it. It is consuming, and it is ... It’s really, really hard because it often seemed there was no end to it, and it kept bringing up all sorts of things.

“It’s like you’re stuck in the past. I can see why people give up.”

She said the past few years had been “soul-destroying and a massive stress”.

“I was just extremely lucky and fortunate that my lawyer understood my situation.”

The Nygaards had been together for more than 25 years and married for most of that time.

Oscar Nygaard had worked hard to build up a company worth $1.7 million, with help from Mona’s family.

When they separated, Mona was ordered out of the upmarket home they shared. She left with little more than a bag of clothes and a small amount of cash.

Her ex also ditched the company they built together, rendering it worthless.

Oscar argued that the loss of the company’s value was caused by economic conditions at the time and by the stress he was suffering as a result of the separation.

However, he accepted he had once told his former wife he would do what he could to create debt within the company and the trust so that she would receive nothing if they separated.

Mona took her grievance to the Family Court, which last year ordered Oscar to recognise her rightful share in what they built, plus compensation.

Judge Kevin Muir ordered him to pay Mona $762,219, which her lawyer, Jennie Hawker, told NZME was the equivalent of a half share in the relationship property pool.

Judge Muir said it included compensation for the “deliberate reduction in the value of the company”.

He said it was arguably vengeful.

“It was not only an obvious outcome of what he did, it must have been his intended outcome.”

Judge Muir said his decision was not meant to be punitive; it simply reflected the reality that the parties would have been in following their separation if not for Oscar’s decisions.

A specialist in relationship property law, Jeremy Sutton, told NZME that it was a fair decision and should serve as a warning to others in acrimonious splits not to make unilateral decisions.

Lawyer Jeremy Sutton said it was a case study in the need for couples to keep working in a business post separation even though they may not want to. Photo / Supplied

“In this case, the judge found that it was a unilateral decision made at his wife’s expense in that he had been in a valuable business and caused a considerable loss to him and his wife.”

Sutton said in his experience, such a move wasn’t out of the ordinary, but a lot of people perhaps didn’t understand that during a separation, they had obligations to the other party to maintain the value and status of the relationship property.

“They think that they can unilaterally do things, but they can’t.

“If they don’t keep maintaining the value of the business after separation, then they can be criticised for that.

“Clearly, in this case, that’s occurred.”

Included in the $762,219 Judge Muir ordered Oscar to pay Mona was $40,000 in compensation for the time he spent living in the family home exclusively, as a form of rent, plus an equalisation payment of $265,000 to balance the amounts that he had already taken from the pool of trust funds.

Nygaard then appealed to the High Court, raising five points, including whether the judge had erred in the value he attributed to the shares in the company when the couple separated, and in making the order for compensation.

He also raised whether the judge erred in taking misconduct into account.

The appeal was dismissed, but at the same time, the High Court set aside the lower court’s decision on compensation and made an order directing Oscar to instead pay compensation of $40,635 from his net share of the sale proceeds.

It corrected an error that Judge Muir acknowledged had occurred in the earlier calculation.

The experience has also left Mona wondering how others, with perhaps scant experience of the legal system, might even begin to understand the process.

She said the terms used and the legal jargon were mind-boggling.

Then, there was the cost, including the appeal she was forced to fight and which cut into what she had retrieved via the Family Court, while she claims her ex was legally aided in his appeal.

After she was told to leave the family home, Oscar ordered their teenage son out, and his new partner moved in before the property, which was owned by a family trust, sold for $3.6m.

Oscar and his partner then left for another country, where they started a new family.

Mona and her son were left living in inferior rental accommodation and had to move several times in the two-and-a-half years after the separation.

“I slept in my car at the beginning, and I had to move, like, around to different people, and was sleeping on their couches, house-sitting, dog-sitting, anything I could, until I could afford to get my own apartment.”

She was now in a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, relieved that the worst now seemed to be over but still unsure of her future.

“I haven’t really ever let myself go that far ahead, but now hopefully, I have some options, and I can put this all behind me.”

Mona had decided to take a break from a job she had held for decades before the High Court hearing because of the toll it had taken on her.

“I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it has been extremely hard and stressful.

“It’s been three years of litigation and processes, and it’s been so harrowing.”

Sutton said it was a case study in the need for couples to keep working in a business post-separation, even though they may not want to.

He has seen more of this happen since Covid and the drastic effects of lockdowns on businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector.

“It is becoming more common just because we’ve had these extreme events.

“People are finding it very hard. Couples now have huge mortgages that they have to service that they didn’t anticipate two or three years ago.

“The stresses of Covid and the recession have made things a lot harder than might otherwise be the case.”

NZME has approached the lawyer representing Oscar Nygaard for comment.

*Names have been altered in line with court rules.

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.