A couple in their 70s, worth close to $20 million, named their children as joint owners on overseas property to reduce future inheritance tax. When the marriage ended, the High Court included all of it in the matrimonial pool anyway.
A Singaporean couple in their 70s, married over 40 years, had named their three children as co-owners of overseas properties in London and Tokyo — a common move to reduce foreign inheritance tax. During their divorce, the High Court ruled the parents were the true owners in substance, and included all three overseas properties in the matrimonial pool alongside the couple's Singapore assets.
While married for over 40 years, the couple — now in their 70s — bought two properties in London and put each of their two sons as a joint owner of one each. They also had a million-dollar home in Tokyo, co-owned with their only daughter, kept mainly for the husband's own use whenever he travelled to Japan. The husband gave the daughter an additional $780,000 so she could buy her own home in Australia, apparently so she wouldn't feel left out at all because she has her own property there.
The husband, 71, started his career as an engineer before venturing into the financial sector, where he worked for over 36 years in various senior banking positions before retiring. His wife, 70, worked in the telecommunications sector for almost two decades before she left to become a full-time homemaker. She later worked part-time as a real estate agent and ran her own art gallery.
Singapore does not impose inheritance tax, but that protection doesn't extend to overseas assets, which are taxed under the rules of wherever the property sits — some countries impose rates as high as 55%. Naming a child as joint owner while a parent is still alive is a common way families try to reduce what gets taxed later, since the child already legally owns a share by the time the parent passes on.
The court still treated the full value of these properties as part of the couple's shared financial contributions when dividing the pool, regardless of the children's names on the title. The wife herself acknowledged in her divorce filings that the Tokyo property was really kept for the husband's own use on his trips to Japan — undercutting the idea that it was genuinely their daughter's asset.
Worth noting: High Court Judge Dedar Singh Gill found that the couple were the actual owners of these properties, and that the children's names had been added mainly as part of legacy planning to reduce foreign inheritance tax exposure — not as a genuine transfer of ownership. On a related dispute over the art gallery's inventory, the judge dismissed the husband's claim as an unsupported assertion with nothing behind it beyond his own say-so.
1. Keep inheritance money separate. A clean paper trail matters more than people realise. In this case, the husband received a $1.5 million inheritance from his late mother but ran it straight through the same account he used for years of ordinary household spending and investing. By the time the marriage ended, nearly a decade of mixed transactions made it impossible for him to prove how much of that inheritance was still his to claim separately — the court simply couldn't untangle it from the shared pool. The fix is straightforward: park an inheritance in its own account from day one, so even partial withdrawals can be traced back to the original source.
2. Don't sweat the small stuff. Courts have limited patience for disputes over low-value or hard-to-verify items. Here, the husband tried to claim his wife's art gallery still held roughly $15,000 worth of coffee-table books, on top of the gallery's modest $4,500 cash balance that had already gone into the shared pool — without producing any real evidence the books existed at that value. It went nowhere, and cost him credibility on the larger issues that actually mattered.
3. Real estate needs real cash flow, not just capital. Multiple properties come with ongoing carrying costs that add up fast — the husband estimated roughly $80,000 over three years just in property tax and management fees for the $7.5 million matrimonial home, on top of upkeep for two further investment properties. A major renovation on any one of them could easily run into six figures. Anyone building a multi-property portfolio needs to budget for the holding costs, not just the purchase price.
Money moves around a marriage constantly — salary gets pooled, inheritances get reinvested, family funds flow in and out of shared accounts for years. That's normal. But it also means that by the time a divorce arrives, tracing exactly whose money is whose can become genuinely difficult, even with good intentions. The judge's view in this case was blunt: once those funds have been mixed for years, a spouse can't retroactively demand a clean separation that was never maintained in practice.
If parents do not want a particular child to inherit the property, they should not give the wrong impression by naming that child as a joint owner. Some parents have included such joint owners only for administrative purposes, because they willed the properties to other children. This caused the joint owners to sue their siblings because they had assumed they would inherit the property upon the parents' death.
So the lesson here is simply this — in trying to save on taxes or for convenience, parents should take care in planning their affairs properly so that their children do not end up wasting a lot more money fighting one another in court.
I see the instinct behind this kind of planning all the time — nobody wants to hand over a huge chunk of their estate to a foreign tax office if there's a legal way around it. But this case is a good reminder that "who's on the title" and "who actually owns it" are two very different questions once a court gets involved, whether that's a divorce, a dispute between siblings, or a challenge from creditors.
If you're holding property overseas and thinking about adding a child's name for tax reasons, the smarter move is usually to get proper cross-border estate planning advice — someone who understands both Singapore's regime and the tax rules of wherever the property sits — rather than relying on the title alone to do the work. A will that clearly states your intentions, alongside proper structuring, tends to hold up far better in court than an informal arrangement that only shows up on paper as a name on a deed.
Working through a property decision tied to a divorce, inheritance, or family estate planning matter?
WhatsApp Bryan → More guides →Source: The Straits Times, Sunday, 26 July 2026, "Divorce Twist: Couple's homes added to marital pool despite their children being co-owners" by Tan Ooi Boon, Invest Editor. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice.
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