Litigation: Cheating husband scores from wife's pension

A woman whose husband divorced her after 35 years of marriage lost her legal bid not to share her pension of more than R2.84m with him, says a Weekend Argus report. The woman asked the Limpopo High Court (Polokwane) to order that her former husband forfeit 50% of her pension money because he was cheating. The parties were married in community of property and thus the husband was entitled to half of everything. But the woman said his behaviour should be condemned by way of ordering that he forfeited his share of her pension fund. The court, however, ruled against the woman. This was because the woman knew for about a decade about his alleged infidelity and chose to ignore it. In turning down the wife’s application for her husband to forfeit 50% of her pension, the court said she had given the respondent permission to continue having extramarital affairs ‘until he got tired of that’.