Innovative use of legal doctrines – that what gets the lawyerly synapses sparking. Imagine that for the best part of a decade you brought up two children as your own only to find later that they weren’t yours but were fathered by your business associate. Apart from the emotional upheaval of such a realisation, think of all that cost. It might not be the first thing to enter the average mind but if you are a successful tycoon then your thoughts will probaly turn to money fairly quickly.

The Times reports that a millionaire businessman is demanding unlimited damages of more than £300,000 from his ex-wife and her new husband, including the cost of bringing up the two children he believed were his for more than a decade. According to The Times :

The man, who was the woman’s first husband, raised the two children as his own — with no clue that they had been fathered by his wife’s lover.

He accuses the pair of fraudulent misrepresentation and deceit, and says he has not been allowed to see the two children since 2006.

Understandably you’d be pretty fuming about this whole affair but one detail of the claim sticks out as particularly galling. The lover apparently asked the unwitting carer of his children at a New Years Eve party:

“Are you and your wife going to have more children? Where does your second son get his lovely curly hair from? Yours and your wife’s is so straight.”

Now that’s just tempting retribution.

Tycoon sues his ex-wife after discovering children were not his [The Times]