Prior Stipulation Based Upon Inaccurate Information Properly Vacated

In a divorce proceeding, the Fourth Department upheld Supreme Court’s vacating the child support and maintenance provisions of a prior stipulation, finding that the wife had not disclosed all of her assets and earnings at the time the stipulation was entered.  The Fourth Department also upheld $50,000 of imputed annual income assigned to the wife by Supreme Court:

… [T]he court did not err in vacating the child support and maintenance provisions of the parties’ October 2009 stipulation.  In that stipulation, the parties had agreed to impute income to the wife in the amount of $15,000, and the husband had agreed to maintenance and child support awards to the wife based on that imputed income.  Although “[s]tipulations of settlement are favored by the courts and not lightly cast aside” (…see generally CPLR 2104), “[a] stipulation of settlement should be closely scrutinized and may be set aside upon a showing that it is unconscionable or the result of fraud, or where it is shown to be manifestly unjust because of the other spouse’s overreaching” … .  We agree with the court that “a reasonable inference exists that the [wife did not] fully disclose[] h[er] financial assets . . . , and, as a result, the terms of the agreement were so inequitable as to be manifestly unfair to the [husband]” … . …[T]he wife had over $100,000 more in income than was imputed to her in the stipulation, and her income was more than two times what the husband had earned in any of the years before the stipulation.  We thus conclude that, regardless whether the wife can be said to have committed fraud, the wife’s failure to disclose her earnings in the stock market resulted in an agreement that was manifestly unfair to the husband.  Marlinski v Marlinski, 979, 4th Dept 11-8-13