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Division of Property Acquired After Separation
© 2004 National Legal Research Group, Inc.
CONNECTICUT: Calo-Turner v. Turner, 83 Conn. App. 53, 847 A.2d 1085 (2004).
Property acquired after the date of separation is subject to division upon divorce. On the facts of individual cases, that property may be divided usually, or even not divided at all. But the presence of case law affirming such a result, where reached by the trial court, does not mean that a different result is an abuse of discretion. On the facts, an essentially equal division of such property is affirmed.
The husband appealed the portion of the judgment granting a divorce which included the financial order distributing to the wife one-half of approximately 66,000 shares of stock held solely in his name. The appellate court affirmed.
The parties separated on December 1, 2000. The husband received the shares of stock through his employment. At one point, a portion of the shares were subject to a resale restriction if he was no longer employed with his company, but that restriction was subsequently lifted. By April 2002, he was fully vested in all of the 66,000 shares of stock which were held in his name alone. The trial court evenly divided this stock between the husband and the wife but awarded to him the right to 6,000 other shares to which he held an option that had been granted to him in April 2001.
The appellate court first noted that the husband did not dispute that the shares were marital property subject to equitable distribution, although it specifically added that to the extent that the husband was arguing the shares were not marital property, that argument was rejected. The court made it clear that under Connecticut law vested property was subject to distribution as of the date of dissolution. The court of appeals declared, rather, that the husband was contending that the trial court abused its discretion in awarding the wife shares of that stock because a majority of the shares became fully vested in him after the parties had separated, reasoning that the wife did not contribute to his acquisition of that stock or to its appreciation after their separation. This contention was also found unpersuasive. It denied the husband's assertion that a court does not have the authority to assign property acquired by either party after separation or any part of the postseparation appreciation of the asset. It was pointed out that where in previous decisions it had been recognized that a trial court did not abuse its discretion in declining to award a spouse the appreciated value in the other spouse's property acquired after separation, the inverse was not determined to be the settled rule, i.e., that it would have been an abuse of discretion for a court to have done so. A trial court has extensive discretion regarding financial awards in dissolution actions, and no single rule or formula is applicable to every dissolution case. Here, it was clear that the court below had examined each of the criteria set forth in the governing statute, Conn. Gen. Stat. Ann. 46b-81, in awarding the wife an equal share in the stock, including the husband's contribution to the acquisition and appreciation of the assets, specifically the shares of stock placed in the husband's sole name. The fact that the lower court did not give that specific criterion the weight that the husband would have preferred was not an abuse of discretion warranting reversal of the distribution award.
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