李 對 甘

On 20 August 2026, the Court of Appeal (Cheung JA and Chan JA) dismissed all five applications filed by the husband in CAMP 86/2024, refusing his application for leave to appeal out of time against the ancillary relief order made by Deputy District Judge Lo Kit-man on 24 November 2023, and striking out four separate fresh-evidence summonses as well as his application to stay execution of the order for possession. Lin Li Lai LLP appeared for the successful wife; the husband, who had acted in person throughout, bore costs of HK$60,000 for the leave summons and HK$70,000 for the first two fresh-evidence summonses on a summary basis.

The marriage lasted from 1998 until separation in 2011, with the wife filing for divorce in July 2013 and a decree made on 25 October 2023. Both children are now adults. The husband repeatedly failed to attend hearings between July 2020 and July 2023, and ultimately did not appear for the ancillary relief hearing on 18 July 2023, claiming illness and an inability to receive court correspondence due to pandemic border closures. The judge proceeded in his absence and granted an equal division of the family assets. The husband's application for leave to appeal was refused by the judge on 12 April 2024, and he then approached the Court of Appeal 20 days out of time.

The Court held that:

(1) the husband's bare assertions of illness and ignorance of hearing dates were not credible: he had in fact written to the court three days before the hearing (§54), had evidently received the wife's closing submissions and earlier orders, and bore an ongoing duty to keep his address updated; the judge was accordingly entitled to proceed in his absence (§59);

(2) the husband's challenge to the 13-year duration of the marriage and to the equal-division principle had no real prospect of success. Applying LKW v DD (2010) 13 HKCFAR 582, §§83–85 and 112–118, the starting point is equal division absent rare or special circumstances, and the husband's bare allegations of unequal contribution could not displace that (§63);

(3) the husband's complaint that the court ignored debts of around HK$9 million ignored the fact that those debts were never put before the judge because the husband had failed to file any updated financial statement since 2013, contrary to prior court orders (§64);

(4) the four batches of fresh evidence were all directed at matters that existed or were available before trial. Applying Ladd v Marshall [1954] 1 WLR 1489, the husband could not satisfy either the first limb (reasonable efforts to obtain the evidence at trial) or the second (material impact on the outcome), so they were correctly ignored in assessing the appeal's prospects (§§33–34, 40, 44);

(5) the fourth summons and the husband's repeated filings in breach of the court's "no further documents without permission" direction constituted an abuse of process, wasting public resources (§48–50).

The husband's appeal has no reasonable prospect of success and there is no other reason in the interests of justice to grant leave. Costs follow the event, and under O 59 r 2A(8) the decision is final without an oral reconsideration.

For practitioners, the decision illustrates how exacting the Ladd v Marshall threshold becomes when a litigant was absent from the original hearing: the appeal must be assessed on the material that was actually before the judge, and evidence the applicant could have produced earlier is presumptively inadmissible. It also reinforces that self-representation, illness, and misunderstanding of time limits will not excuse a delay of even three weeks, and that repeated, unfocused evidence applications in defiance of filing directions will be treated as abuse and visited with consequential costs.