Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock
Judge | Warren Khoo L H J |
Judgment Date | 17 June 1998 |
Neutral Citation | [1998] SGHC 204 |
Citation | [1998] SGHC 204 |
Court | High Court (Singapore) |
Plaintiff Counsel | Tan Siah Yong |
Defendant Counsel | Gill Z S |
Published date | 28 March 2013 |
Judgment:
GROUNDS OF DECISION
1. This is an appeal against the learned district judge Laura Lau’s decision on the division of matrimonial assets following a divorce.
2. The parties got married in 1970. It was a long marriage, but almost never a happy one. The wife’s petition for
divorce was on the ground of the husband’s unreasonable behaviour - habitual gambling, constant borrowings from relatives and friends, the wife having to repay his debts, harassment by loan sharks and so on. There are three children, all born in the early years of the marriage. They are now all adults, two girls aged 26 and 25, and a son aged 21. The son is a student at university.
3. The matrimonial assets available for distribution in this case consists only of one HDB flat. The learned district judge went meticulously into the arithmetics to ascertain how much each party had contributed in monetary terms to the acquisition of the property. She came to the figures of 66.2% and 33.8% as the respective financial contributions of the husband and the wife. The learned district judge then referred to the principles laid down by the Court of Appeal in the case of Ng Hwee Keng v. Chia Soon Hin
Principles of division
4. Division of matrimonial assets is not a science. It is a judicial attempt to divide what was never intended to be divided in the first place. The legislature and the courts have formulated general guidelines, but it is possible for two judges each doing his or her honest best to come to two significantly different results. An appeal court should not interfere with the decision of the court of first instance unless it is so far out of line as to be perverse, or unless the lower court has clearly gone wrong on...
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NK v NL
...we are unable to agree. The traditional approach was considered in the Singapore High Court decision of Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock [1998] SGHC 204 by Warren L H Khoo J, who interpreted direct financial contributions as only one factor amidst the multifarious factors for consideration (a......
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...[2007] 1 SLR 75 (folld) Ryan Neil John v Berger Rosaline [2000] 3 SLR (R) 647; [2001] 1 SLR 419 (folld) Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock [1998] SGHC 204 (refd) White v White [2001] 1 AC 596 (refd) Yow Mee Lan v Chen Kai Buan [2000] 2 SLR (R) 659; [2000] 4 SLR 466 (folld) Women's Charter (Cap ......
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Chan Tin Sun v Fong Quay Sim
...these facts will typically not be borne out by contemporaneous records, as underscored by the court in Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock[1998] SGHC 204 at [6] (cited by this court in NK v NL, as quoted above at [8] of this judgment). The broad-based approach also avoids what this court has des......
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Chan Tin Sun v Fong Quay Sim
...these facts will typically not be borne out by contemporaneous records, as underscored by the court in Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock [1998] SGHC 204 at [6] (cited by this court in NK v NL, as quoted above at [8] of this judgment). The broad-based approach also avoids what this court has de......
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Family Law
...presumption is not rebutted, equality is the resulting end-point proportion of division. This was used in Soh Chan Soon v Tan Choon Yock[1998] SGHC 204 (‘Soh’) and Louis Pius Gilbert v Louis Anne Lise[2000] 1 SLR 274. This approach stood in contrast with that in Yow Mee Lan v Chen Kai Buan[......