He said he had bought half her WA house. There was no half to buy

Mr Lucci and Ms Freda met overseas in 1989, began living together there in 1990 and married there in 1995. They had two daughters and moved to Australia in 1996. In December 1989, before they lived together, she had bought a block of land in Western Australia for $113,000 in her own name. Her mother provided $150,000 to build a house on it, and from 1998 it was the family home.

In 2007 she and the girls moved back overseas, and the house was let. The couple separated there in January 2008, and he returned to Australia. From early 2008 she received the rent and kept it. He said that years earlier he had bought her mother's half of the house, paying with money he had saved overseas, and he asked the court to declare that he owned half.

Justice Duncanson rejected that claim. His accounts of the payments kept changing and were mostly unsupported by documents. The house had always been the wife's, so her mother had no half to sell. The wife said her mother's $150,000 was a loan she still owed. The judge found it was not, and treated it as a contribution made on the wife's behalf. But the husband had lived in the house, improved it and maintained it, and that counted.

The legal fees each had paid, $208,263 for him and $146,277 for her, were added back. The property came to $1,885,656, which the judge divided into two pools. In the first pool, everything except their property overseas, worth $1,380,827 and holding the house at an agreed $925,000, her land, her savings and her mother's money made her contributions greater: 60% to her, 40% to him. Each kept their own property overseas. Nothing more was adjusted for future needs.

Overall the division was 70.1% to her and 29.9% to him. Under the orders the judge proposed, she was to pay him $261,069 within 60 days. If she did not, the house would be sold and the proceeds, after any capital gains tax, divided to give the same result.