Young first made headlines (in the Daily Mail mainly) when a judge lifted reporting restrictions in 2009 on her extremely dogged efforts to grab her rightful share of her husband's suspected £400 million ($905 million) fortune.
Property developer Scot Young had walked out on their 11-year marriage three years earlier, declaring that the collapse of a big Russian deal had left him penniless. His wife wasn't having it. Her contention was, and still is, that Scot Young was worth "a few billion pounds, at least".
The courts heard that Michelle Young hired eight private detectives to track Young's movements, working in shifts. He, in turn, repeatedly lied about his true wealth, funnelling it into offshore entities, even being jailed for six weeks for "flagrant and deliberate" contempt of court.
After 65 hearings, and millions frittered away in legal fees, Michelle was awarded £20 million in 2013. The judge complained, however, that "extremely serious allegations have been bandied around like confetti". Michelle reasserted that justice had not been done. "Woman who says £20 million divorce deal isn't enough!" reported the Mail.
Since then Scot Young, who battled drug problems and suffered from bipolar affective disorder, has died. Well, that rather underplays it. He was impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor Mayfair flat.
Michelle has suggested there might be something more sinister to the incident than mental ill health. She also complains that she has never received a penny of the award because he had hidden it all away. Oh, and she is facing an £11.2 million legal action by the backers who funded her divorce battle, on the grounds that instead of using their funds to pay for the costs of her litigation, she appears to have used some of the cash for what they describe as her "Champagne lifestyle".
But the specifics of Michelle's case aren't why we are meeting, nor why the TV team is following her around. It might sound hard to believe, but Michelle believes there are some wider issues in her extraordinary case that should make us all worry. And she has set up the portentously named Michelle Young Foundation (she also refers to it as the First Wives Club) to highlight them.
Asked to explain her objectives over a fizzy water at an unpretentious pub - the Constitution in Pimlico - Michelle robotically intones without stopping for breath: "The reason I set it up is that I have had 10 years of litigation in which I have had to borrow money from litigation funders, on huge returns, trying to get the justice I deserve. What I have been left with is a judgement order that is no more than an empty paper bag." There is a pause. "Impressive," she mutters to herself.
Perhaps, but it doesn't sound like a rallying call to the masses. Some further questioning elicits more significant goals: to make the courts go after super-rich men who try to hide their wealth through sophisticated financial engineering, both from their wives and the taxman; and to cut down on the legal costs at the family courts that can often lead to whole estates - often quite modest ones - over which a man and former wife are fighting to then be blown on fees for their lawyers. That is more substantial. And Michelle has three other big characters behind her cause.
First to join us at the Constitution is Janna Kremen, 48, former wife of a Russian oligarch. Kremen met her husband, Boris Agrest, in 1988 when she worked as a military officer in the Soviet Ministry of Defence. He started off as a manager of a Russian pop group but became a financier with an extraordinary range of business interests. Kremen suggests that the foundations of his massive wealth date back to the wild west years that was early post-communist Russia.
Kremen was awarded a divorce payout of £12.6 million in 2012. But that was an emotionally straining and financially crippling five years after she had demanded a divorce from the husband she describes as aggressive, only to be told by him that technically that had already happened without her knowing (in Israel - it's a long story), and that due to a post-nuptial agreement she had signed she should move out of the family home (a £9 million mansion in Surrey) and be given only £1 million from his estimated £30 million fortune.
When she took her ex-husband to court, he further claimed he was penniless, earning just £150 a month from a Russian business. But Kremen wasn't having it. After all, she'd seen oodles of cash up close. "Before we moved to the UK," she says in a thick Russian accent, "I was deeply involved in his business because I was doing the book-keeping, the bank accounts, his partner's accounts. I was connected," she said. "I was so smiling when I was watching The Wolf of Wall Street the other day. Did you see it? Remember how they had suitcases with money? That is how I travelled to Switzerland." She giggles. "Can you do this now? It is impossible, isn't it?"
The court heard that Kremen's husband, then 43, who had taken up with a 23-year-old, nevertheless sought to evict her and his three children from their home and leave them in financial ruin. He was, the judge said, "actuated by extreme malice".
Not only was her husband lying about being penniless and unemployed - evidence of various business interests in Panama, Lichtenstein and Belize helped - but the post-nup she had signed was a sham, the court concluded. Agrest was described by the judge as a serious and serial nondiscloser determined to do down his wife by "foul means". But he then ran back to Russia, leaving the courts pretty powerless to enforce her award. Agrest has since been described by the high court as "a fugitive from justice". His ex-wife and three children were left with £1 million out of the few assets her husband left in Britain.
For Kremen, the part that really enrages her, though, is the legal fees. It was an endless fight to get any justice, she says, with hearings galore and "shadowy" attempts to sell their family home from under her feet which she believes should never have been allowed to get off the ground. Her husband once told her that Britain was a "good place for rich men". That, she concluded, was true. "If I had a good lawyer, this case should have taken a few months, and no problems. But in three months the lawyers' fees were £45,000, which I couldn't pay, and they had done nothing but send letters.
I went to the Citizens' Advice Bureau and they put me in touch with a different lawyer, who was a lot cheaper. But it was the same story: pay money, pay money. No action. Hundreds of letters were sent between my lawyers and his. Altogether my legal fees were £90,000. It shouldn't have been like that."
Charming, intelligent and sparky, but no longer extremely rich, the final women to join us, Caroline Hopkins and Vivien Hobbs, know a thing or two about legal fees. "These lawyers are getting huge amounts of cash from these fighting couples," says Hopkins, 63. "Of course it is worse if one half is very wealthy and has loads of money behind them to carry on fighting, which is what my husband was like." How much did you spend on lawyers? "I hate the idea of that going in [to the article] but it was over £300,000."
Hopkins had claimed in court that she was bullied into signing a post-nuptial agreement as her marriage to William Hopkins started to crumble. He is one of the richest men in Somerset and worth an estimated £38 million. She adds that she found Hopkins' lawyer, Fiona Shackleton (who was famously soaked by a water jug-wielding Heather Mills at the High Court at the end of her divorce battle with Sir Paul McCartney), to be an intimidating presence in the background to her decisions at the time.
The court heard that Hopkins had "confessed to bullying behaviour" in letters, but concluded that Caroline had not been "operating under any undue influence, duress or improper pressure when she entered into the post-nuptial settlement". She was left with one home in Wincanton, Somerset, worth £530,000, and a £250,000 bungalow which she has had to re-mortgage to pay the legal fees. The post-nuptial agreement also gave her a lump sum of £200,000, and she will get 50 per cent of her husband's pension. She's adamant that it wasn't enough and that the judge was mistaken, and she is taking legal action against one of her solicitors.
And then there is Hobbs - campaign manager of the Michelle Young Foundation. "The entangled complexities of the relationship between these parties and their litigation could be the subject matter of a book," Justice Holman said at the latest hearing regarding Hobbs' divorce (her second) to naval architect Dennis Welch, 66, who lives in Singapore.
Her first divorce left her saddled with a debt of £414,000 to her solicitors due to legal wranglings over the settlement. Her second has seen her rack up around £70,000 in legal bills so far, with Hobbs insisting her husband has not been frank about his wealth and enjoys a "Champagne lifestyle". He denies it. The court agrees with him. Hobbs, 58, has a court of appeal hearing coming up.
"The commonality of most people who come through the Michelle Young Foundation website is that they are screaming injustice," she says. "I was a sceptic at first. I rationalised it as individual failures, but the numbers have built and there is a growing feeling that it is a problem with the family courts - they are dysfunctional."
It isn't, however, an argument with which Hobbs' former husband, who successfully applied for a two-year civil restraint order on her in July preventing her from making further applications in the court against him, has much sympathy. Asked to respond to her complaints, Welch emailed: "I've no wish to comment on the so-called First Wives Club other than my ex-wife is described on the Foundation website a co-campaigner/campaign director - 'a tireless campaigner of civil liberties'. It should be added 'whilst also receiving state benefits as being allegedly unfit for work'.
"The facts of my divorce judgments are now thankfully the subject of public knowledge in which she is described as 'vengeful, obsessive, irrational and unjustified'. She applied all of these characteristics as a 'serial litigator' who has wasted large sums of money and court time in denying facts and reality and causing unbelievable stress and pain in her relentless attacks on me, her first husband and our families." Hobbs says she is no longer on benefits.
It might be tempting then to dismiss this campaign as something of a concerted, and perhaps even at times irrational, moan. Back at the Constitution, Michelle Young and Hobbs (who have claimed to the police that their phones are being tapped) talk ominously about the judiciary being on the take and misogynistic judges helping out their golfing friends when they come up in court.
But cut through all the hyperbole, and there is something here. These women have been through hell. Each of them loved their husbands and were left devastated by the collapse of their relationships. Children were sometimes involved. Their own lives were thrown up in the air and they have, in quite significant respects, been let down by their lawyers or the system. And the courts can be horribly brutal. Caroline, who is clearly a nervous interviewee, says she is not the same woman today having lived through her ordeal.
There may not be a conspiracy against these women and others, but ask lawyers who are coming to the end of their careers and feel free to be frank, and the Family Courts do appear to resemble one hell of a cock-up.
Pam Collis, a family law solicitor for 30 years, and an expert in big money claims, insists that however the system is set up, there will always be devious people who get away with hiding their wealth. A good lawyer, she adds, knows when to cut and run and not eat too heavily into their client's cash.
"There are certain men you cannot catch out. I had one disastrous case with a lady living in Surrey, in a whopping great house, married to a man who had pots of money, but there was almost nothing I could do for her. The money had disappeared. The house was in an offshore company. It was awful. I had another case where I got the solicitor on the other side to come round to my office. The husband's solicitor said: 'Listen, my client is Russian. You are never going to discover what he has got.'
"I said: 'I know, but this can't be true.' And he said: 'But, Pam, what are you going to do?' My client and I had foreseen this, so we just did the best deal we could. There was no point in running up costs.
"I could have gone and gone, but my client would have ended up with nothing."
But as pragmatic as Collis says lawyers need to be, the courts aren't holding the rich to account, she admits. It isn't misogyny to blame, though, she insists. It's a matter of the law. "The powers are there to imprison people who refuse to disclose, but they are not always exercised in the way they should be, in my opinion. The Human Rights Act has changed things dramatically."
The Michelle Young Foundation has set up a petition demanding reform (it has 366 signatories). It is arguable whether Michelle and co are the right people to be waging this fight. But as their former husbands know, they are highly unlikely to be dissuaded.
- Canvas, Observer
