Man claims an imposter stood in for him at his wedding in bid to avoid expensive divorce

This is so funny. Imposter indeed:

Via Dailymail:

An investment banker who claims an imposter stood in for him at his own wedding has failed in his attempt to avoid a big money divorce suit.

Former top-earning UBS banker Amit Goyal, 36, told a judge his headhunter wife Ankita 'married another Amit Goyal' at a ceremony at a four star hotel.

He said he was relaxing at home six hours away while the service was taking place.

The high-flying city couple, who lived at Canary Wharf, London, met on Indian dating site Shaadi.com.

They were married on September 15, 2003, in the Indian city of Meerut - but Mr Goyal insists he was 'not present at the ceremony'.

He claimed his 33-year-old wife could neither divorce him, nor claim any financial support, because they were never married in the first place.

However, Judge Mark Everall QC granted Mrs Goyal a decree nisi last year after describing her husband as an 'unreliable' witness and ruling that 'there was a valid marriage between the couple'.

Challenging that decision at the Court of Appeal, Mr Goyal pointed to a mysterious thumb print on his marriage certificate - and an absence of wedding photos - in a bid prove himself a bachelor.

He also told Lord Justice Kitchin he is £300,000 in debt - despite earning £185,000-a-year, plus bonuses, before he was made redundant.

But his complaints were thrown out by the judge, who said he had 'no prospect' of blocking his wife's divorce petition.

Mr Goyal met his wife on the Indian matrimonial website in 2003.

He had then been accepted to study at the 'very prestigious' INSEAD business school in Paris, having worked in London since 2002, but agreed to meet his prospective bride back in his homeland.

The pair became engaged three days after they met and a wedding was fixed for the following month with the consent of Mrs Goyal’s senior army officer father.

'Mrs Goyal and her parents were happy to go along with the plan. Mr Goyal was a well-educated young man with evidently good prospects in the well-paid world of international finance,' Judge Everall said in his ruling.

He flew to New Delhi and his fiancee’s family arranged a 'short marriage ceremony', in advance of the full festivities, in order to speed along her French visa application prior to the couple’s flight to Europe.

However, the banker asserted that his wife tied the knot with an imposter at Meerut’s luxury Hotel Samrat Heavens, claiming that he had been six hours’ away in his home town, Bathinda, on the morning of the nuptials.

'His case is that Mrs Goyal and he were not married on September 15, 2003; he was not present at any ceremony that may have taken place on that day. His case is that she married another man that day,' Judge Everall explained.

Mr Goyal said this meant his subsequent 'marriage', celebrated just three days later, was invalid - even though the groom’s name on the wedding certificate for the previous ceremony matched his own.

The pair moved to France and then the UK, before their daughter, now six, was born in 2007. But their relationship 'irretrievably broke down' and Mrs Goyal moved out of their Docklands home in 2011.

Mr Goyal claimed that he had 'not read the certificate carefully enough' in 2003 and that the first time he noticed the discrepancies in the dates was more than a year after the relationship ended.

Judge Everall heard expert evidence that a photograph, supposedly depicting the groom on the marriage certificate, was not of Mr Goyal, and a thumb print on the document, which was purportedly his, belonged to someone else.

The expert also highlighted a number of 'oddities' about the registration of the marriage.

Nonetheless, the judge said that 'the overwhelming probability on all the evidence is that Mrs Goyal did not marry, and did not intend to marry, a different Amit Goyal on 15th September, 2003.

'Why should she do so? Why should she do this on September 15 and then marry Mr Goyal on September 18 and fly with him to France?' the judge asked.

Mr Goyal was a 'highly educated and intelligent man' who had worked for Barclays, Deutsche Bank and UBS and who was 'precise and careful'. But the judge said of him: 'I did not find him a satisfactory witness'.

Rejecting his claim that he did not check the marriage papers until long after the split, the judge said his evidence about that was 'unconvincing and implausible'.

'I find there was a valid marriage between Mrs Goyal and Mr Goyal on September 15, 2003, in Meerut, India,' the judge concluded, before formally ending their union.

On appeal, Mr Goyal argued in person that it 'simply was not possible' that he could have made the ceremony in time, because he was in Bathinda at 9am on the day of the wedding.

Pointing to the lack of wedding snaps, he said: 'Marriage is the one of the most sacred things in the Hindu religion. If you say to someone there is a marriage without photographs, it simply does not add up.'

But Lord Justice Kitchin said: 'Standing back and having regard to all the evidence and Judge Everall’s reasoning, I do not detect that he had any real difficulty in arriving at his conclusion.

'Indeed, having regard to his finding that Mr Goyal’s evidence pointed to him being unreliable, it seems to me that the conclusion to which he came was, in reality, the only one which was open to him.'

The judge concluded: 'I’m satisfied there is no prospect of success in this application. It must therefore be dismissed.'

Speaking after the hearing, Mrs Goyal said she was 'very happy' at the outcome which would have 'massive implications' for her future.