Few inheritance disputes fail on quite so many different grounds. In a recent High Court decision, a surviving partner tried to establish an interest in property owned by his late partner and, separately, sought further financial provision from the estate. Both claims failed, with the court finding that each fell at a number of separate legal hurdles.
Inheritance disputes involving unmarried couples often involve several separate legal issues, and this judgment is a useful illustration of how many there can be. This case touches on property ownership, the supporting evidence available for the claim, how the couple organised their affairs during their lifetime, and, ultimately, whether the law recognised the claim being made at all.
Background
Huan Liu, known to friends and colleagues as Chris, was a clothing designer, born in China, who moved to London to study fashion and built his career there. He died in April 2017 at the age of 47. Tibor Matyas had worked alongside Chris for many years in the fashion businesses Chris ran, handling sales and management while Chris focused on design. The two men were also partners in a personal relationship.
When Chris died, he owned two London flats in his own name. He also owned a share in a third property, a buy to let flat, which he had bought jointly with Matyas, meaning both their names were on the title and Matyas automatically kept his half when Chris died. Chris’s Will left his two solely owned flats mostly to his brother and parents, with a small share of one of them going to Matyas.
Matyas was not happy with that outcome and brought two separate legal claims against the estate.
Claim one: a share in the flats
The first claim had nothing to do with inheritance law. Matyas argued that, even though the two flats were only in Chris’s name, he was still entitled to half of each of them, because the two men had run their finances and their lives as a single shared enterprise and paid no real attention to whose name was on the paperwork.
Claims of this kind come up reasonably often when unmarried couples split up or when one partner dies, and the law does allow for it in principle. Just because a property is only in one person’s name does not automatically mean the other partner has no claim to it at all. But the person making that argument has to prove it. They need to show there was a real agreement, spoken or otherwise clearly understood between the couple, that the property would in fact be shared, and that they gave something up, or acted to their disadvantage in some way by relying on this agreement, because they believed that was the arrangement.
The judge did not accept that Matyas had shown this. One of the two flats had originally been bought in both their names by mistake, and once that mistake was spotted, Matyas signed a document confirming that the flat should have always been in Chris’s name alone. The judge treated that signed document as very hard to argue around later, however close the relationship had been. The second flat had been paid for entirely with money that could be traced back to Chris, with no financial contribution from Matyas at all. A central part of Matyas’ account, an alleged consultancy arrangement with a Chinese fashion company said to be worth a large sum each year, turned out to have no supporting paperwork of any kind, and the judge concluded it was more likely than not that this arrangement had never actually existed.
The judge also found Matyas to be an unconvincing and unreliable witness, saying his account of events was often inconsistent with the documents from the time. None of that means the relationship itself was not genuine. It means that, when what Matyas said in court did not match the paper trail, the judge trusted the paper trail instead.
Claim two: financial support as a surviving partner
The second, and arguably more commonly encountered, claim was made under an Act called the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. In simple terms, this Act allows certain categories of people who believe they have not received reasonable financial provision from a deceased person’s estate to ask a court to award them something from that person’s estate whether this is money or some other form of provision. This can be the case where they have been left out of a Will altogether or where the provision made for them is considered insufficient. Those who may be eligible to bring a claim include spouse, former spouses (in certain circumstances), children, and in some cases, unmarried partners as well.
For an unmarried partner to bring this kind of claim, they would be doing so on the same basis as a husband or wife would, whereby three separate things generally need to be true. First, the person who died needs to have had their permanent residence, known in law as their domicile, in England and Wales. Second, the surviving partner needs to show they lived with the deceased, in the same household, as a married couple would, for at least two years immediately before the death. Third, even if the first two points are satisfied, the court still has to be persuaded that the Will genuinely failed to provide enough for the surviving partner’s reasonable needs. If any one of these three things cannot be shown, the whole claim fails. In this case, the judge found against Matyas on all three.
Whether the couple lived together as a married couple would
The judgment looks first at the question that will be most familiar to anyone who has read about this case, namely whether Matyas and Chris had lived together, in the way a married couple would, for the two years before Chris died. It is worth explaining carefully, because it is easy to assume that living together for a long time, and being genuinely in love, is enough on its own. It is not.
The court accepted that the two men were in a real, long-standing relationship. What it had to decide was whether that relationship had actually been lived, and presented to the outside world, in the way a marriage would be. The judge looked closely at how Chris described the relationship to other people and to official bodies, rather than simply taking the couple’s own sense of the relationship at face value. Chris had described Matyas to his family, and consistently in letters to his solicitors, as a business partner rather than a domestic one. When giving instructions for his Will, during the very two year period in question, he described himself as single and gave Matyas’ address as their shared business premises rather than the flat the two men were said to live in together. A reduced council tax bill, normally only available to someone living alone, had been claimed on that flat, and Matyas’ driving licence showed the business address too, not the flat. Chris’s own design company was also set up so that its shares would pass to his family when he died, not to Matyas.
None of these things on their own would necessarily have been decisive. Taken together, though, the judge found they were not consistent with two people living together as a married couple would throughout that two-year timeframe, whatever the emotional reality of the relationship may have been. This is really the central lesson of the case for unmarried couples. The court is not asking whether two people loved each other, or whether their relationship was genuine. It is asking a much narrower question: was that relationship actually lived, and consistently shown to the world, in the same way a marriage is? There is no fixed checklist for this. Courts look at things like whether a couple shared a home, presented themselves publicly as partners, ran their finances together, and behaved from day to day the way spouses typically do. A relationship can be entirely real and still fall short of this test if the evidence, taken as a whole, points the other way.
Even if that hurdle had been cleared, there was a second problem
It turns out that the living together question would not have been enough to win the case on its own. The judgment goes on to look at the completely separate issue of where Chris was legally domiciled. This is a specific legal issue, different from where someone happens to live day to day, or what passport they hold. It refers to the one country a person treats as their permanent home, the place they intend to stay for good rather than for a particular job, a period of study, or any other temporary reason. Everyone has a domicile from birth, usually their parents’ home country, and the law assumes that domicile continues unless there is strong, clear evidence that a person has deliberately and permanently made a new country their home instead.
Chris had lived and worked in London for many years and held a British passport, but the judge found he had never lost the domicile he was born with. Chris held strong and continuing ties to both China and New Zealand. He still held a valid New Zealand passport, renewed only a few years before he died, and had described his nationality as a New Zealander in an official company filing. He also kept close ties with his family in China, sent significant sums of money there over the years, and described himself as being from China when giving instructions for his Will. Taking all of this together, the judge was not satisfied that Chris had ever formed a clear, settled intention to make England and Wales his permanent home for good, rather than simply the place he happened to be living and working at the time. Because of that finding, the 1975 Act did not apply to his estate at all. Even if Matyas had won the argument about living together as a married couple, the claim would still have failed because of this alone.
Whether the Will already provided enough, and whether the claim was too late
Even if Chris had been domiciled in England and Wales, and even if the couple had met the living together test, the judge found that Chris’s Will had already provided reasonably for Matyas in any case. Matyas was thirty-nine when Chris died, in good health, and had a strong professional background across design, sales and management. He automatically kept his half share of the jointly owned buy to let flat, worth around one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and inherited a further share of one of Chris’s other flats under the Will. In total, this gave him assets of around two hundred and sixty five thousand pounds, roughly a fifth of the value of the whole estate. The judge considered this a generous provision, not an inadequate one, and found that Chris had no further duty to provide for Matyas beyond what the Will already gave him.
There was also a practical, procedural problem. Claims under the 1975 Act normally have to be brought within six months of a grant of probate, which is the official document confirming who is legally allowed to deal with a deceased person’s estate. Chris died in 2017, but this claim was not properly brought until 2025, some nine years later. A court can allow a late claim in the right circumstances, but the judge declined to do so here, finding that the delay reflected a sustained pattern of avoidance on Matyas’ part rather than genuine circumstances beyond his control. This too would, on its own, have been enough to end the claim.
What this means for unmarried couples
For anyone living with a partner without being married, this case is worth understanding properly, not because any single part of it is unusual, but because together it shows just how many separate ways a claim like this can fail. There is no such thing as a common law marriage in English law, however often the phrase gets used, and however long a couple has lived together. Without a Will that clearly provides for a partner, that partner has no automatic right to inherit anything at all, and any later claim for further provision depends on clearing several distinct hurdles, from where the deceased was domiciled, to the true nature of the relationship, to genuine financial need. Any one of these can be enough, on its own, to end a claim.
A Will that clearly sets out what should happen to an estate removes most of this uncertainty. It means a partner’s entitlement does not depend on reconstructing, after the event, how the relationship was described to other people over the years, still less on working out where the deceased was legally domiciled. A cohabitation agreement can do similar work for property and money during the relationship itself, letting both partners set out what they intend while they can still discuss and agree it together, rather than leaving these questions to be argued over in court, potentially many years later. It is also worth checking carefully how any jointly owned property is held, and making sure that anything signed along the way genuinely reflects what both partners actually intend, since documents like these can carry a great deal of weight if a dispute ever arises.
The courts can only apply the law as it stands. They cannot rewrite a Will, invent a share in a property that was never actually agreed, or create rights simply because a relationship was long and loving. For unmarried couples, the best protection remains the simplest one. Make a Will, put property and financial arrangements in writing while both partners are able to discuss them properly, and take advice early, rather than leaving these questions for a court to untangle long after the people who could have explained them are no longer able to.
