'Cheating' husband tried to take back loyalty gift of £8m home

A lawyer who gave his wife a £7.8 million London home after he was allegedly caught being unfaithful has been criticised by a court for trying to seize control of the property when they divorced.

According to The Times ,Essam al-Tamimi gave his wife, Rouzin al-Charmaa, the eight-bedroom Mayfair apartment next to the Saudi Arabian embassy and a smaller neighbouring property, the Royal Court in Jersey was told. He also gave her a £2 million flat in nearby Marylebone.

Ms al-Charmaa, 35, told the court that the gifts were made after her husband, a prominent lawyer in the Middle East, had thrown her out of the family home when she discovered his alleged affair. She was pregnant at the time.

The couple were reconciled and Mr al-Tamimi agreed to transfer to her the companies that owned the properties “as reward for her being a faithful wife”.

Ms al-Charmaa said that her husband left the family home in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, in 2015, locking a safe containing £1 million of jewellery, gifts that had never been returned to her.

She discovered that he had also sent an email to the chief executive of his investment company instructing her to take over the companies that owned the London properties. He had written: “Just qality [sic] and discretely [sic] be sure that the two company which own the two flats in London I am the only beneficiary.”

Ms al-Charmaa claimed that if her husband was telling the truth that the companies belonged to him then he had lied to banks, lawyers and government authorities when stating that she was the beneficial owner, committing multiple crimes in the UK and Jersey.

Mr al-Tamimi told the court he had originally transferred the companies into Ms al-Charmaa’s name after discovering that his first wife was taking legal action for separation against him.

A lawyer who worked for his legal firm told the court that Ms Charmaa had said after the separation: “I want to crush him like he has crushed me and I know that he loves the London properties so I will take them from him.”

Mr al-Tamimi, 55, said it had been agreed that his wife would hold the companies under her name as a nominee, even though she was recorded as the real owner in legal documents and with the Jersey financial regulators.

William Bailhache, the bailiff of Jersey, ruled in favour of the wife. He said Mr al-Tamimi “was prepared to hide assets from his first wife . . . and one could surmise that he was willing to hide them or take them back from his second wife [Ms al-Charmaa] as well”.

The court had assumed that Mr al-Tamimi had not committed a crime but it could not recognise “any arrangements which detract from the ability of regulators or law enforcement agencies” to identify the real owners of companies.