Cheating husband gets pension bonus

A LIMPOPO woman whose husband divorced her after 35 years of marriage lost her legal bid not to share her pension of more than R2.8 million with him.

The woman asked the Polokwane High Court 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.

The woman, a retired teacher, said she and her husband got married in community of property in 1985. On her retirement in 2019 she was paid a lump sum pension benefit of R2840000.

She said her husband should forfeit his share, owing to his “misconduct”.

She testified that her application for forfeiture was based on the misconduct on the part of the respondent (husband) and the circumstances that gave rise to the breakdown of the marriage.

She said the problems in their marriage started in 2007 when her husband started having an affair with one of his employees. She became aware of this after someone told her about the affair.

She said she and her husband from time to time fought about his affair.

The woman said since then things got worse and they decided to see a marriage counsellor together. “During the session he told the counsellor that this affair is something that is in him. He also said that if there is a man who does not have a mistress, that man is a fool,” the woman told the court.

According to her, her husband told the counsellor he would never stop having mistresses. She said that was when she told the counsellor that she did not see the session going anywhere.

She told her husband at the time that she was adamant that they must remain husband and wife, but that they would not be intimate with each other until he told her he was “tired of mistresses”.

But things did not change, she said, as she on occasion caught her husband and his mistress inside his parked car. She also discovered that he had given his mistress some of the cattle which she and her husband had accumulated.

The husband said the woman was simply a business associate to whom he from time to time gave business advice. Regarding the missing cattle, he explained that some were sold to buy feed for the rest, some were stolen and others had died.

He eventually initiated the divorce proceedings around 2017, as he claimed that they had simply drifted apart. The husband also complained that his wife withheld conjugal rights.

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”.