The owner of Monaco football club has been ordered to pay a world record divorce settlement of more than £2.6 billion to his ex-wife.
Judges in Switzerland said Dmitry Rybolovlev, 47, has to give Elena Rybolovleva, who was with him for 24 years, a very precise 4,020,555,987 Swiss francs and 20 centimes.
In current sterling rates, this amounts to £2,681,297,538 and 78 pence – an estimate of half the Russian oligarch’s entire fortune.
It follow a six year legal saga in which Mr Rybolovlev, who made his billions through a successful fertiliser business, bitterly contested Mrs Rybolovleva’s claims to two of the most expensive properties in the USA and a £100million Greek island.
Now Mr Rybolovlev must sign a cheque for the incredible sum in the Swiss city of Geneva, where Mrs Rybolovleva lives in a lakeside mansion.
The settlement is far higher than the £1.5 billion paid by art heir Alec Wildenstein to his ex wife, Jocelyne, which until now had been the largest confirmed public divorce settlement in the world.
Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, was told to give his former wife, Anna, £1 billion in 1999. He went on to marry his third wife Wendi Deng, from whom he is now divorced.
Mr Rybolovlev, who was found by the court to be worth £5.2 billion — although the figure is believed to be a conservative estimate of his wealth — and his ex-wife have been at war since 2008 over the terms of their divorce.
Mrs Rybolovleva won custody of the couple’s 13-year-old daughter Anna, along with Mr Rybolovlev’s half of their former home in Cologny, an up-market neighborhood of Geneva, Daily Mail informs.
