Two Hearings. One Question.
Two Hearings. One Question.
When the System Preserves a Fraud Challenge but Sells the Home
A survivor's account of justice deferred — and why it matters beyond one case
By Samantha Avril-Andreassen | June 2026
In the space of a week, two family court hearings took place that together illuminate something important about the state of civil justice in England and Wales — not only for the individual at their centre, but for every survivor of domestic abuse who has ever tried to pursue a fraud claim without a lawyer, without a home, and without the institutional protections the law was written to provide.
This is what happened. And this is why it matters.
The First Hearing: A Judge Who Said the Case Was in the Wrong Place
At the first hearing in late May 2026, something remarkable occurred. The judge presiding over a financial remedy dispute raised — unprompted — the question of why the case was listed at the court it was in. No adequate explanation was provided. The listing manager could not say why proceedings that had begun elsewhere, where significant judicial findings had already been made, had been transferred to this court years earlier.
That question matters more than it might appear. The transfer had occurred after an adverse finding was made against the respondent in the original proceedings — a finding that the respondent's company was his alter ego and that its assets were, in substance, his personal assets. After that finding, the case moved. The judge who made it never saw the case again. The final hearing took place before a different judge in a different court with no knowledge of what had already been found.
A finding was made. Then the case moved. The next judge never knew.
This is forum shopping. It is a recognised abuse of process. The Atlantic Star [1974] AC 436 confirms that a party cannot evade an adverse judicial finding by changing venue. Yet it happens. And when it happens in family proceedings involving a litigant in person facing specialist representation, the consequences are not merely procedural. They are irreversible.
The Second Hearing: The Paradox the Court Created
At the second hearing in early June 2026, the court faced an application to set aside a financial remedy order on grounds of fraud and material non-disclosure. The applicant — a litigant in person with diagnosed PTSD, homeless since being excluded from her own solely-owned property — had spent years assembling documentary evidence. Companies House filings signed by the respondent himself showed net assets of hundreds of thousands of pounds throughout the proceedings. He had told the court he had nothing.
The court did not dismiss the application. It accepted jurisdiction. It found the allegations sufficiently serious to warrant further evidential examination. It gave the applicant twelve weeks to file supporting documentation.
And then it permitted the sale of the property to proceed.
The court preserved the challenge. It did not preserve the home.
This is the paradox. If the allegations are serious enough to be preserved — serious enough for the court to say: we need more evidence before we can decide this — then they are serious enough to preserve the asset those allegations concern. The property at the heart of this dispute is the property the challenged order provides for selling. If it is sold before the fraud is determined, the challenge becomes academic. The legal right survives on paper. The home does not.
American Cyanamid Co v Ethicon Ltd [1975] AC 396 asks three questions before an injunction is refused: is there a serious issue to be tried? Would damages be adequate? Does the balance of convenience favour preservation? The court answered the first question — yes, there is a serious issue — and then declined the injunction. The logic is difficult to follow.
Sixteen Months of Homelessness, Used Against Her
At the hearing, the court noted that the applicant had not resided at the property for approximately sixteen months. That observation was used, at least in part, to support the conclusion that the sale should proceed.
But those sixteen months of absence were not voluntary. They were the direct consequence of enforcement proceedings arising from the very order that is now under challenge for fraud. The applicant was excluded from her own home — the property she has owned since 2019, purchased with the proceeds of her pre-marital property, mortgaged in her sole name, funded entirely alone — by the enforcement of an order she contends was obtained by fraud.
The consequence of the challenged order was treated as a justification for making it permanent.
This is circular reasoning. A party enforces a disputed order. The enforcement causes homelessness. The homelessness is then used as evidence that the property is no longer needed as a home. The logic allows the effects of an alleged wrong to be used as justification for completing that wrong. It is precisely the kind of reasoning the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was designed to interrupt.
Section 1 of the Act defines economic abuse as behaviour that has a substantial adverse effect on a person's ability to acquire, use, or maintain money or property. Evicting the sole owner of a solely-mortgaged property through enforcement of a disputed order, while she continues to pay the mortgage, bills, and ground rent from outside her own home, is economic abuse in its most concrete and documented form.
The Employment Argument That Was Never Put to the Other Side
At the September 2023 hearing — the hearing whose order is now under challenge — the respondent's counsel advanced the case that the applicant's employment was not genuine. That she was placed on the payroll solely to enable a mortgage application. The court accepted that narrative as part of the basis for the order made.
What the court did not have before it was a Mortgage Agreement in Principle dated July 2019 and a broker fee receipt dated August 2019. The mortgage was agreed in principle and the fee was paid seven months before the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was introduced in March 2020. The furlough scheme — under which the applicant was subsequently furloughed, with her genuine employment certified to HMRC by the company itself — did not exist when the mortgage was being obtained.
You cannot be furloughed to raise a mortgage that was agreed seven months before furlough existed.
The argument that employment was created to raise the mortgage is not merely contradicted by the evidence. It is chronologically impossible. And at the June 2026 hearing, with that evidence before the court, the judge did not put it to the respondent's representative. Did not ask how these two positions — genuine employment certified to HMRC, fictional employment argued to the court — could both be true. Did not require a response on the record.
Active case management under FPR Rule 1.4 requires courts to identify issues at an early stage and ensure that the parties are on an equal footing. A court that has documentary evidence capable of demolishing a central fraud argument and does not engage with it is not discharging that obligation.
The Man Who Could Not Afford His Own Lawyers
Throughout these proceedings the respondent has been represented by London specialists in complex high-asset financial remedy work — described by Chambers UK as a go-to set for high-earning clients dealing with complex finances. At the FDR hearing in June 2023 the judge remarked that he did not understand why the respondent needed such expensive lawyers given the financial picture being presented to the court.
The financial picture being presented was one of impecuniosity. A man of limited means. A company worth nothing. No significant assets.
The Companies House accounts tell a different story. Net assets throughout the proceedings of between three hundred thousand and over six hundred thousand pounds. Dividends extracted during the proceedings exceeding four hundred thousand pounds. A director's loan account showing personal advances of over one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. All signed by the respondent as sole director. All publicly available. None placed before the court.
A man who claims to have nothing does not retain specialist London counsel at London rates unless he has something to pay them with.
The proportionality test requires courts to examine whether legal resources are deployed proportionately to the issues. But there is a deeper point. When specialist representation is funded by concealed assets against an unrepresented survivor — when the very assets being hidden from the court are the assets paying the lawyers who hide them — the adversarial process is not merely unequal. It is corrupted. The fraud is not only in the financial disclosure. It is in the architecture of the litigation itself.
What the System Got Right — and What It Must Now Do
It would be wrong to say the system failed entirely. The court at the June 2026 hearing did not dismiss the fraud challenge. It accepted jurisdiction. It recognised that the allegations deserved further examination. It gave the applicant an opportunity — twelve weeks — to assemble the documentary evidence that will support her case.
That is not nothing. It is, in fact, significant. It means the court has not closed the door. The challenge is alive. The allegations are on the record. The companies' accounts are before the court. The mortgage documents are before the court. The furlough evidence is coming.
But the door that remains open leads to a home that may no longer be there when the case is finally decided. And that is the institutional failure this paper documents — not malice, not conspiracy, but the grinding asymmetry of a system that recognises vulnerability in principle while failing to protect it in practice.
The door that remains open leads to a home that may no longer be there when the case is finally decided.
The Human Rights Act 1998 requires courts acting as public authorities to comply with Convention rights. Article 1 of the First Protocol protects the peaceful enjoyment of possessions. Article 8 protects the right to respect for home. Article 6 guarantees not merely a formal hearing but an effective one — a hearing capable of producing a meaningful result. Permitting the disposal of the subject matter of proceedings before they conclude does not produce a meaningful result. It produces a hollow one.
Why This Matters Beyond One Case
This is not a story about one dispute. It is a story about a pattern.
The pattern is this: a survivor of domestic abuse — statistically likely to be a woman, disproportionately likely to be a woman of colour, almost certainly to be without legal representation — faces a legally represented opponent in complex financial remedy proceedings. The opponent has access to resources, to expertise, and to the procedural advantages that come with both. The survivor has the truth.
The question the justice system must answer is whether the truth is enough. Whether the evidence in the public domain — the company accounts signed by the respondent, the HMRC records certifying genuine employment, the mortgage documents predating the furlough scheme — can reach a court in a form that can be acted upon. Whether the procedural tools available to unrepresented litigants are genuinely accessible to people who are homeless, traumatised, and fighting without support.
The Equal Treatment Bench Book recognises the intersection of race, domestic abuse, mental health, and self-representation as a category requiring heightened scrutiny. The Macpherson Report established that institutional failure can occur not through individual malice but through the collective inability of an institution to provide appropriate service. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 named coercive control, economic abuse, and litigation abuse as forms of domestic abuse deserving legal recognition.
The framework exists. The question is whether it is applied — consistently, rigorously, and in the full range of circumstances for which it was designed.
The framework exists. The question is whether it is applied — consistently, rigorously, and in the full range of human circumstances for which it was designed.
A Note From the Author
I write this as someone with direct experience of the proceedings described. I have chosen the analytical frame deliberately — not to obscure what happened, but to locate it within the broader institutional landscape that gave it its shape.
The SAFECHAIN™ framework was built because I lived this. Because I saw the gaps — between the law as written and the law as experienced, between the protections that exist on paper and the protections that function in practice. Because I believe that survivor knowledge, properly documented and properly argued, has the power to change both.
What happened in those two hearings is not the end of this story. It is one chapter. The application remains alive. The evidence is coming. The record is growing.
And on days like today, when the system frustrates and exhausts and tests every limit, it still matters that the truth is documented. That it is on the record. That it cannot be erased.
Samantha Avril-Andreassen is the founder of SAFECHAIN™ and author of Unmasking Justice.
The Directive is published at safe-chain.org/the-directive
© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen / SAFECHAINN Ltd. All ri