VIC v VID
| Jurisdiction | Singapore |
| Judge | Sheik Mustafa |
| Judgment Date | 21 May 2020 |
| Neutral Citation | [2020] SGFC 47 |
| Court | Family Court (Singapore) |
| Hearing Date | 12 March 2020 |
| Docket Number | FC/D 1680/2019, District Court Appeal No. HCF/DCA 22/2020 |
| Plaintiff Counsel | Wong Li-Yen Dew (Dew Chambers) Assigned by the Director of Legal Aid |
| Defendant Counsel | The defendant wife in person. |
| Subject Matter | Family Law,Matrimonial law,Women's Charter,Dissolution of marriage,Divorce,Unreasonable behaviour,Separation |
| Published date | 30 May 2020 |
I shall refer to the Plaintiff as “the Husband”, and to the Defendant as “the Wife”.
The Husband had filed a writ for divorce on the ground that the Wife had behaved in such a way that he cannot reasonably be expected to live with her, and on the ground that they have lived apart for a continuous period of at least 4 years immediately preceding the filing of the writ. The Wife contests this.
I heard the oral testimony of both the Husband, and of the Wife, at the trial. Counsel assigned by the Legal Aid Bureau represented the Husband. The Wife represented herself. After hearing both sides, I decreed the marriage dissolved, and that the Wife shall pay costs to the Director of Legal Aid. I adjourned the ancillary matters, to be heard separately.
The Wife appeals against my judgment. The following are the reasons for my judgment.
Background factsThe Husband is now 70 years old, and the Wife is 67 years old. They had married 45 years ago, in May 1975, in Singapore. They are both Singapore citizens.
At the time of marriage, the Husband was a schoolteacher. The Husband remained a teacher for 38 years until his retirement in 2004. The Wife ceased to work as a seamstress just before the marriage. Thereafter she was a home maker.
Their marriage yielded 3 children – a daughter and 2 sons, in that order. They are presently all adults, aged between 44, 41 and 38 years old.
The couple obtained an HDB flat, then a HUDC flat, then an antebellum terrace house, and finally a two-storey terrace house, which I shall refer to as “the matrimonial home”.
The Husband’s caseThe Husband paints a picture of a marital storm that began in 1997. Somewhere then, the Wife woke up one day and told him that her late mother had appeared to her in dreams, telling her to be kind to cats. Doing so would save her from perdition. She resolved that her only way to salvation was to be kind to cats and looking after them. She believed that this would enable her to not only cross into Paradise, but also protect her family.
The Wife developed an obsession with cats. She went around feeding stray cats. Their youngest son brought home a kitten. From then on, the Wife began to collect stray cats and adopted them into the matrimonial home.
This feline collection created quite a nuisance. The cats roamed the home freely. They were not toilet trained, and would urinate and defecate indiscriminately. There was a stench of cat faeces and urine emanating from the matrimonial home, which led to numerous complaints by neighbours. The police and other authorities turned up and warned the Wife. Nevertheless, she did not cease her feline collection.
The Husband claims that he pressed the Wife to send the cats for re-homing elsewhere, but the Wife was adamant not to do so. The Husband could no longer bear to sleep on the marital bed, as it was constantly defiled. To maintain some semblance of hygiene for himself, he slept on a mat on the floor instead. However by 2003, he could not tolerate it any more and called the police on his own wife. He showed the police the condition he was living in, but the officers responded that it was a domestic issue, and left it at that. The Wife progressively became more hostile and irritable. The Husband put it down to menopause and avoided her as much as possible.
The Husband retired in 2004, and was to receive a pension of $500,000. He used a portion of it to settle the outstanding mortgage on the home. The rest was deposited into 5 joint accounts suggested by the Wife. Sometime in 2005, the Husband went to check on the accounts. He was surprised to discover that there were only 2 accounts to his name. He immediately closed the 2 accounts and moved the $100,000 from there into a new account in his sole name.
The Husband confronted the Wife about the missing funds. The Wife responded to the effect that she had taken the money. They kept quarrelling, and their already bad relationship became worse.
In 2006, one of the Wife’s cats urinated on the Husband whilst he was sleeping. It was the last straw. After a bout of arguments, the Husband left the matrimonial home, to live with his brother-in-law. He has not returned since then. He claims that on at least 2 occasions when he tried to go home but was chased away by the Wife. The last occasion he went to the matrimonial home was on Chinese New Year Eve in 2007, but was not able to enter as no one was in. Ever since then, the parties have not lived together and ceased to have contact with each other altogether. He was kept estranged from his children by the Wife, so much so that he has no clue on what has happened to them. Even when one of the sons was in ICU at the hospital, the Wife prevented him from visiting.
The Husband adduces a newspaper report showing that their daughter was fined in the State Courts in YYYY1 for not paying wages to her domestic worker for more than a year, and for putting her to work at an unauthorised location, which was a house in Johor Bahru. It reported that the domestic worker had been employed to look after the Wife at the matrimonial home. The report also stated that the Wife had tasked the domestic worker to look after the cats both in the matrimonial home as well as in a rented house in Johor Bahru. It went on to state that the Wife alleged that the domestic worker killed off 40 of the cats, and that the Wife sued the employment agency for this loss.
The Husband also adduces an online report by from YYYY2, purporting to show that the Wife had been employing domestic workers since the time he left the matrimonial home. He also adduced another online article posted on Junk Asia allegedly posted by the Wife herself, which contained a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office, the High Court and the Attorney-General’s Chambers. In it, she stated that she was a bankrupt because she was ordered to pay costs for the legal proceedings.
By these articles, the Husband submits they show the motive why the Wife contests the divorce application, in that she wishes to retain the matrimonial home in order to avoid accounting to the Official Assignee on her share of it.
The Wife’s CaseThe Wife puts forth a defence, but no counterclaim. She discharged her lawyers halfway through the course of the case, filed her own affidavit of evidence-in-chief, and advocated on her own behalf at the hearing.
The Wife chronicles a litany of ails that she suffered at the hands of the Husband. They are numerous and detailed, but because she is not claiming for a dissolution of the marriage based on any of them, I find them to be irrelevant. I will instead focus on her evidence that relates to the Husband’s claims.
The Wife confirms that she did indeed withdraw a large amount of money from the joint account savings of the Husband’s retirement. In fact, she says that she is grateful to the bank staff who told her to withdraw $200,000 from it. She used the money to buy a car for her younger son, to buy a van, and for other things as well. She candidly confirms that she did not inform the Husband, nor did she obtain his consent, prior to the withdrawal. She attempts to justify this by saying that the Husband had spent $165,000 of funds from his sole account for himself.
The Wife keeps many cats at home. She does not confirm or deny the specific incident leading to the Husband’s departure. The authorities took action against her, and it led to her bankruptcy due to her debt to the Attorney-General. She blames the Husband for this.
She confirms that the Husband had left home “more than 10 years ago”, although she emphasises that he was not forced to do so.
Issues The issues of the case to be decided by the Court are as follows –
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