Online Reporter
Fidelis Munyoro
Chief Court Reporter
The long – running battle over the sprawling Allan Grange Farm has ended with the High Court ordering a 55–45 split in the value of the farm’s 99-year lease, giving Dr Ignatius Chombo 55 percent and his former wife, Marian Chombo getting the remainder.
But while the State remains the owner of the land itself, the court has ruled that the rights and benefits flowing from the registered lease are a matrimonial asset capable of division.
Presiding over the matter, Justice Phillipa Phillips made it clear that the dispute was not about handing ownership of State land from one former spouse to another.
Instead, the court was concerned with the economic value attached to the leasehold rights accumulated during a marriage that began with a customary union in 1985 and was followed by a civil marriage in 1993.
The judgment brings a dramatic chapter in the former couple’s relationship into sharper focus: a vast commercial farming enterprise, millions of dollars in borrowing, machinery, irrigation projects, cattle and crops, competing accounts of who built the farm – and a bitter disagreement over what remained after the marriage ended.
The court found that Marian Chombo was entitled to an equal share as the starting point, but ultimately reduced her benefit by five percentage points to account for liabilities borne by Dr Ignatius Chombo after the couple separated.
“Benefits come with liabilities, we take the good with the bad,” Justice Phillips observed in explaining the reduction.
The result, 55 percent for the plaintiff and 45 percent for the defendant.
The judgment traces the dispute back to Allan Grange Farm, a property measuring roughly 3 099 hectares. Although the farm itself belongs to the State, a 99-year lease was registered in 2007 during the couple’s marriage.
That lease became the centrepiece of the dispute.
The case had already reached the Supreme Court, which sent it back to the High Court with instructions to determine the value of the spouses’ rights in the farm and distribute that value equitably.
The Supreme Court had settled an important point: the land was State property, but the rights and benefits attached to the registered long-term lease were an asset of the spouses.
At the retrial, the two sides painted sharply different pictures of the farm.
Dr Ignatius Chombo, who was being represented by Advocate Anesu Bangidza of Manase and Manase Legal Practitioners, told the court that farming had been anything but a financial bonanza.
According to his evidence, the operation was weighed down by substantial borrowing for tractors, combine harvesters, irrigation equipment, seed, fuel, labour and other agricultural requirements.
He said he had taken on debts with several banks and later consolidated them into a payment arrangement. He also said he assumed responsibility for machinery, lorries and other movable-property liabilities after the divorce.
His argument was that whatever value the lease might have appeared to possess on paper had been swallowed by debt.
He maintained that the farm had been a source of financial strain rather than profit and that the benefits being generated in later years were being reinvested into the enterprise and used to meet outstanding obligations.
The farming dream, he suggested, remained a work in progress. He told the court that agronomists had estimated that about US$2.7 million would be required to rehabilitate fields and address gullies, while a joint venture covering more than 2 000 hectares had been entered into because the operation could not be sustained financially on his own.
Yet the court was not persuaded that the existence of debt automatically erased the value of the lease. Justice Phillips pointed to a crucial evidential problem in Dr Ignatius Chombo’s case.
“Having alleged that the leasehold rights were of negative value due to indebtedness,” the judge said, it was necessary for him to provide “cogent and reliable evidence” showing the extent of those liabilities and their impact on the lease’s value.
The court expected material such as financial statements, loan agreements, bank records and valuations that could objectively establish the net position. That evidence, the judgment found, was lacking. And then there was Dr Marian Chombo’s account of life on the farm.
