America’s 24th Richest Person Attempted To Limit His Divorce Settlement By Trying To Exploit A Hilarious Loophole In Oklahoma Law

Divorce settlements can be quite ugly, and the payments to the estranged spouse can be brutal . To avoid paying a rather stiff divorce settlement, America’s 24th richest man recently attempted to cleverly albeit unsuccessfully twist an interesting loophole in Oklahoma state law.

Oil baron Harold Hamm’s divorce settlement is the stuff for the history books. With a net worth of almost $19 billion, you can only imagine how big his divorce settlement would be without a proper pre-nuptial agreement in place. During his nearly 50 years as Oklahoma oil man, Harold Hamm has done everything on a gigantic scale. Hamm owns the largest piece of the greatest oil discovery of our age, in the shale-rich plains of North Dakota.

Now Hamm can add another not-so-sweet superlative to his larger-than-life career: He is paying one of the biggest divorce settlements in history. But before he was forced to fork out nearly $1 billion to his ex-wife, Sue Ann Hamm, the man tried a novel plea with the Oklahoma judicial system to wiggle out of paying the settlement.

Hamm crafted his legal strategy around a quirk in Oklahoma divorce law. According to the local law, the money a spouse makes during a marriage can be considered in the settlement “if it is made through skill” — but not if it’s made through what the state’s Supreme Court called “changing economic conditions, or circumstances beyond the parties’ control.”

So Hamm argued that he didn’t actually build his financial empire, but simply “got lucky,” reported Vox. However, the judge didn’t see Hamm’s way, and with the bang of gravel, the judge awarded Sue Ann Hamm $1 billion, which Hamm will have to pay over the coming months. The judgment requires Mr. Hamm to pay his ex-wife about $320 million, or one-third of the total settlement, by the end of 2014. The rest is to be paid in chunks of at least $7 million a month.

Despite paying a billion dollars, Mr. Hamm’s settlement is quite less compared to what Russian oligarch and “fertilizer king” Dmitry Rybolovlev forked out to his ex-wife. Dmitry’s ex-wife was awarded $4.8 billion in the settlement.

For want of a single document that is considered pretty standard – the pre-nuptial agreement – Mr. Hamm, who describes himself as “more hardheaded than other people,” had to take a softer stand in front of the presiding judge, reported the New York Times. Interestingly, he has already paid his ex-wife roughly $25 million since the case was filed in 2012, the ruling stated.