Appeal court restores lifetime maintenance for professor’s ex-wife

The Court of Appeal has reinstated a lifetime spousal maintenance order for Professor Errol Morrison to support his ex-wife, overturning a lower court’s decision for its termination in 2025.

“If this order is allowed to stand, it could unjustly expose the appellant (Mary), upon its termination, to wander the barren plains of penury or become a charge on the State,” the appeal court argued in its judgment published in January.

It also highlighted that the principle of a ‘clean break’, which allows for the termination of spousal support after a set period, was not suitable in this case.

Clean break is a principle used by courts to achieve finality in financial provisions made for a spouse after the breakdown of a marriage.

Supreme Court Justice Dale Staple had ruled in November 2022 that the principle was part of a ‘modern approach’ and was applicable in the Morrisons’ case, where the original maintenance had been in place since 2002.

However, the appeal court panel, comprising President Marva McDonald-Bishop, Evan Brown, and Georgiana Fraser, said Staple erred in modifying the original order without demonstrating that Mary Morrison could achieve financial independence without undue hardship.

Mary brought the appeal against Staple’s decision to terminate the maintenance order that now-retired Justice Lennox Campbell put in place in 2002.

Mary, a retired teacher and Errol, a scientist, were married for almost 31 years and had three children before they divorced in 2001. At that time, Mary, a retired teacher, was 55 years old. By 2022, both were in their late 70s. Errol had also remarried.

In 2002, the judge ordered Errol to provide spousal maintenance of $150,000 per month for his ex-wife during their joint lives. He was also to provide a motor vehicle not older than five years of a similar value to the one she was driving at the time.

In June 2021, Mary applied to the Supreme Court for the monthly amount to be increased to $250,000 and for Errol to be required to provide a new Suzuki Vitara motor vehicle.

Mary argued that the original sum was inadequate; and her material situation had changed negatively while the income of her ex-husband had improved significantly.

Errol later applied for the order to be lifted or for the amount to be reduced to $70,000. He indicated that he was retired and that there had been “a significant adverse change” in his finances and that given the 19 years of the original order, his ex-wife had had sufficient time to arrange her affairs post-retirement.

Staple ruled in November 2022 that the spousal maintenance order should expire after three years. He rejected Mary’s view that she was due a car every five years.

SERIES OF ERRORS

Staple also said that he was satisfied that their financial situation had changed “for the worse” though Errol’s was “in the stronger financial position”. He increased the maintenance payment to $230,000 monthly for the remaining three years.

“I am of the view that in those circumstances, it is time for his maintenance to come to an end,” he said after rejecting Mary’s request for a lump sum payment of $6 million if the order was going to be terminated.

However, the Court of Appeal disagreed with Staple’s view and highlighted a series of errors the lower court judge made.

Brown, who wrote the unanimous opinion, said Staple’s reference to the $36 million total payments since 2002 “in the circumstances which propelled him to strive for a clean break is befuddling”.

Brown said Staple did not provide a proper analysis in applying the clean break principle even after acknowledging that Mary would face hardship. Staple “was wrong to have resorted to the clean break principle”, he said.

Brown said that while the clean break principle is expressly written into the Maintenance Act, Parliament “saw it fit to abridge its operation, limiting it to common-law spouses whose cohabitation had terminated”.

“If this order is allowed to stand, it could unjustly expose the appellant (Mary), upon its termination, to wander the barren plains of penury or become a charge on the State – the very antithesis of the clean break,” he said, noting that the considerations of two properties Mary owns in Malta was not adequate.

Brown contended that Staple’s discretion to modify the maintenance order “could only have been properly exercised on demonstrable evidence of a change in the means” of Errol or Mary.

He said, based on Staple’s conclusion, “there was no factual basis to disturb the duration” of the 2002 order.

Brown pointed out that Staple, acknowledging that Errol had “fared better” since 2002, noted the depletion of Mary’s savings, her inability to maintain herself and the absence of evidence to show that the existing maintenance order allowed her to have a viable career change and reduce her financial dependency.

The appeal court agreed with Staple’s decision that the 2002 order did not mean that Mary was to get a new vehicle every five years.

Meanwhile, McDonald-Bishop said that one of the effects of their decision was that Section 6 of the Maintenance Act did not apply to applications for maintenance made by spouses in a marital union but only to common-law spouses.

For her part, Fraser acknowledged that she made an error in a ruling in another case last year in which she applied that section to married spouses, reasoning that the provision allowed for a clean break approach in spousal maintenance cases.

However, upon reviewing the Morrison case, she accepted that Section 6 applied only to common-law spouses and that the Matrimonial Causes Act, not the Maintenance Act, governed maintenance for married couples.

Mary was represented by attorney Carol Davis, and King’s Counsel Andre Earle and attorney Crystal Nicholas, instructed by Earle and Wilson, appeared for Errol.

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