Desperate. The guy was freaking. “You have to do this separation now! I am losing a fortune every day!” The couple were worth $8M when $8M was real money.

He was a stock promoter, hustler, trader. He lost and won thousands every day. But he won a lot more than he lost….that is, until the separation was sprung on her. The day he said he wanted out, she had her lawyer freeze all the accounts. Guy couldn’t work. Shell company garbage stocks were frozen. Good stocks were frozen. Bank accounts frozen. His credit card was frozen. He was frozen.

She, on the other hand, was hot. Bitter, mean, bullying-as-a-cop but hot. When she came into my office, I saw the real life equivalent of Jessica Rabbit. Her figure was straight out of the centrefold of a Playboy (or so I am told). Her face was sexy-pouty gorgeous but only lightly made-up. Beautiful hair all over the place. She had as much body exposed as one could legally get away with and what was clad was spray-painted on. She was really hot and she knew it.

Seems the accounts being frozen was not the coldest part of the stand-off. She would only lift the freeze if he gave in to her demands (he had a court date to implore a judge that the freeze was a mistake given his profession but it was some time off). The coldest part was that she wanted it all.

BC Family/Canada Law (maybe not Quebec) has no fault divorce. No fault divorce means many things but the one that seems the most important to disputants is that the family estate gets divided equally. Equal never really happens for a variety of reasons (children, employment, etc) but splitting things equally and practically is the concept.

Equally is a word that best lies in the eyes of the dividers. If two parties agree to an unequal division by straight math, but they swear in the separation agreement that the deal ACTUALLY IS equal due to other factors, the courts/Registry will accept the parties definition of ‘equal’ and register the agreement. If they say it is equal, then it is equal.

Quick digression: If she has a pie and he has a cake then each taking theirs could be considered equal. But so would he and her taking half the pie and half the cake each. So would he and her taking a slice of pie and giving up a slice of cake. And, not finally, so would it be equal if they mashed the two together and split the pile of pie-cake. Equal can take many forms.

Once you accept that equal can take many forms, then the definition of equal is left almost entirely to the parties. ‘IF’ they agree. ‘IF’ is what mediation is all about.

“I want it all. I want the accounts, I want the money and I want the house, boat and Whistler chalet. He can go make more money. I cannot. I have no skills, no education, no work history. I need it all.”

“No skills whatsoever? No education at all? Nothing? What have you done for the last 15 years (she looked to be in her mid thirties).”

“What do you think? I whored! I got here on my back. Plain and simple. And now I am getting older. This (she gestured sweeping her hand down her body) is not going to play much longer. I’ve maybe got four years tops to get what I want if I am lucky. You want proof? He wants out. He WANTS OUT. That’s where I am at – HE WANTS OUT!!!”

I could see why he felt desperate. (I kinda wanted out myself). He wanted to leave the marriage and that is reason enough in Family Law. And there were no kids on which some kind of continuing relationship may have been possible. She basically chained him to the marriage by freezing all their assets. And the price of freedom was going to be high.

I asked him to leave her with me for a bit….he was happy to do so. And we chatted. After awhile I learned that he had not made the whole of the $8M estate himself. It seems that between Pilates, yoga, Starbucks and lunching out with her girlfriends, she occasionally looked for run down expensive properties. Shaughnessy and the British Properties were her hunting grounds. She aspired to better neighbourhoods.

Of course she used her husband’s money to buy the house and to then renovate it. The couple would then move in for a couple of years until she wanted to move up in the world and so off she’d go again. They had the Whistler property and the Huge British Properties house by her ‘trading up’ and overseeing the remodeling. Each ‘trade up’ was profitable. I explained that her history proved that she was more than just a pretty face, she was an astute buyer, a renovator, a decorator, a real estate whiz and a money-making seller. She had a very lucrative profession.

Everything about her demeanor changed. She hadn’t seen her work in that light. She thought of it before as simply being a good housekeeper. Her face changed. Her voice changed. It was like a different (but still scary-sexy) person in the room. Her mind started going to houses that she had recently seen, the cost of the purchase (all numbers done rapidly in her head) and the cost of renovations. She was already running down the road.

“But I need his money to do that!”

“True. But you are entitled to half already. Four million dollars is more than enough to get started. Make a deal. Get your share of the money and go to work. In this market you may do better than he does and you only have to do one a year…maybe two…CRA considers one a year to be a profession and then you are taxed. But, if you do it every two years and each house is renovated, it is a principle residence and you are not taxed.”

After about an hour of exploring the issue a few more times, she asked me to call her husband back in. A half hour later, they had the deal. But they also had no trust. Who would? So two hours or so later, I had written the agreement up in the proper format and they headed off to find a notary to witness it.

That agreement was a Jessica Rabbit pulled out of the hat!