A family business or business belonging to one of the spouses will be taken into account when coming to a divorce settlement. It will be treated as an asset of the marriage. There will be two aspects of looking at the business, one is whether it has a sale value, owned properties, for example. What is the realisable value of the business and secondly, what are the maintainable earnings going forward that the business can produce? It is very common for businesses, even small businesses, to be valued by a forensic accountant who’s a specialist at looking at business values and what a business could achieve to ascertain the value. That value will then be treated like any other matrimonial asset and be divided between the parties and in a long marriage, the starting point will be an equal division of the family business.
