Whose stake is it if only the husband is on the register?
Andrei is 47. In 2014 he and Igor, a friend from university, set up an engineering company: ventilation for shopping centres and warehouses, with around eighty people on the payroll. Andrei holds 60%, Igor 40%. Andrei has been married since 2011; his wife Marina never worked a single day in the business and brought up their two sons. In spring 2026 she filed for divorce and division of property. The story is a composite and the names and figures are invented, but clients bring us files like this regularly.
Andrei’s first reaction is understandable: I built the company, so what has Marina got to do with it? The law sees it differently. Under Article 34 of the Family Code, property acquired during the marriage belongs to the spouses jointly, and stakes in the capital of commercial organisations are named there expressly. It does not matter in whose name the stake is registered or who put in the money. A spouse who ran the home and raised the children also has a right to the joint property.
So the 60% in the company is joint property. This is where the nuances begin.
The service company Andrei registered in 2008, three years before the wedding, remains his personal property. The Supreme Court took the same approach in a 2024 dispute over a stake in a company set up before marriage (Ruling No. 302-ES24-6555). The reverse is possible under Article 37 of the Family Code, where joint money or work invested during the marriage significantly increased the value of the property. With company stakes, that is hard to prove.
A quarter of the family printing business, which his father gave Andrei in 2019, is also his: a gift stays with the person who received it, just like a flat received as a gift (more in our article on gifting a flat). Dividends, on the other hand, which Andrei had been putting into a deposit account for years, are usually treated by the courts as joint income.
Frankly, at this point Andrei breathed a little easier. Not for long.
Dividing an LLC stake on divorce: what the articles of association decide
Marina’s lawyer put the claim bluntly: half of Andrei’s stake, that is 30% of the company, and a seat at the general meeting. When Igor found out, he rang his partner after ten at night. He had no intention of working with Andrei’s ex-wife.
Until the property is divided, Marina has no corporate rights. The Supreme Court confirmed this in its Review of Judicial Practice No. 2 (2023): buying a stake during the marriage does not give the other spouse the right to take part in managing the company.
After the division, everything turns on the articles of association. The Supreme Court’s Judicial Chamber for Economic Disputes treats the division of spouses’ property as a transaction, so the transfer of a stake is subject to the restrictions the participants have written for themselves (Ruling No. 305-ES20-22249). Where the articles say nothing about consent, a spouse awarded half the stake can join the company simply by submitting an application. If the articles require the other participants’ consent and they refuse, the spouse retains the right to demand that the company pay out the actual value of the stake. Where the articles prohibit any transfer of stakes to third parties, that right arises immediately after the division judgment: so the Supreme Court held in 2023, sending back for retrial a RUB 11.7 million claim by the ex-wife of a sole participant (Ruling No. 304-ES22-20237).
The articles of Andrei’s company, drawn up from a template in 2014, contained the sentence he needed: a stake may be transferred to a third party only with the consent of the other participants. Igor cheered up noticeably.
There is a catch. The actual value is paid by the company itself, not by Andrei, and the Law on Limited Liability Companies generally allows up to a year for such payments. For a company that runs on customer advances, that is a blow to cash flow, and a blow to a business in which Igor holds 40%.
Incidentally, there is a fresh example from autumn 2026, reported by “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”. A district court awarded two former spouses 25% each in an LLC; the other participant relied on a consent clause in the articles, but three levels of court held that, since the stake had passed under a court judgment, no consent was needed. The Supreme Court overturned those rulings.
Two prices for one stake
Now to the money. The nominal value of Andrei’s stake under the articles is RUB 60,000, and in the first week he seriously hoped that this was the figure to be divided. It is not. But nor does the stake have a single price: there are at least two.
The actual value is calculated as the law prescribes: it is the portion of the company’s net assets proportional to the stake. You take the balance sheet and subtract liabilities from assets. At the end of 2025 the company’s net assets stood at RUB 80 million. 60% of that gives RUB 48 million, and Marina’s half comes to RUB 24 million.
The market value is derived by a valuer from the business’s future cash flows, its signed contracts and the prices of comparable companies. Marina’s expert valued the whole business at RUB 400 million, Andrei’s valuer at RUB 210 million, since half the revenue depends on two customers and on Andrei’s own personal connections. Nobody has made a mistake; the assumptions are simply different.
Which price will the court use? If the whole stake stays with Andrei and Marina is awarded compensation, as paragraph 3 of Article 38 of the Family Code allows, courts usually rely on the market value established by a court-appointed expert. It is assessed as at the time the case is heard, not the date of the divorce, as the Plenum of the Supreme Court explained in Resolution No. 15. If the company has a good year while the case is in progress, the compensation goes up.
If, however, Marina receives half the stake and Igor refuses to admit her, the question becomes one of actual value, paid by the company. The law does not say directly which period’s balance sheet should be used when the claimant is a spouse.
Valuers also argue about the discount. Andrei’s 60% is a controlling stake, but the 30% that could go to Marina is not: a stake that size does not give control of the company and is worth less. Should a discount for lack of control apply if the spouse is awarded money rather than the stake itself? Case law offers no single answer, and in our story this is where the parties haggled longest.
The court ordered an expert valuation. The expert put the business at RUB 290 million.
What not to do while the divorce is under way
In stories like this, the partners almost always come up with a plan. Igor suggested urgently rewriting the articles to prohibit the transfer of the stake to anyone at all. The finance director came up with something more elegant: increase the authorised capital, bring in an investor he knew and dilute Andrei’s stake to 10%.
The Supreme Court has already dealt with the articles tactic. In the Volgograd Region, the sole participant of an LLC amended the articles in the middle of a property division so that his ex-wife could not join the company. In July 2024 the Economic Disputes Chamber saw signs of abuse of rights in this, overturned the lower courts’ decisions (Ruling No. 306-ES23-26474) and added that any restriction affecting spouses must be stated explicitly in the articles, with any ambiguity construed in favour of there being no restriction.
Dilution is a subtler matter. The entry of a new participant with a contribution is not in itself a disposal of the stake, and the spouse’s consent is not required for it (Ruling No. 305-ES23-8438). But consent is required if the transaction reduces the joint property, that is, the actual value of the stake. A disproportionate contribution, an investor the company does not need, a participant leaving soon afterwards: a court will read that picture as an attempt to take the stake out of the division. And Article 39 of the Family Code allows the court to depart from equal shares to the detriment of a spouse who has reduced the joint property in bad faith.
Quietly selling the stake to Igor will not work either. A transaction involving a stake is certified by a notary and requires the other spouse’s notarised consent. Without it, Marina could challenge the sale within one year of the day she learned of it. If property has nevertheless been disposed of against her will, or hidden, its value is taken into account in the division.
To his credit, Andrei shelved both ideas.
Which court, and what time limits
A dispute over the division of spouses’ property does not become a corporate dispute even when it involves company stakes (Article 225.1 of the Arbitrazh Procedure Code), so Marina’s claim is heard by a district court. A claim against the company for payment, or a dispute over amending the articles, goes to the commercial (arbitrazh) court instead. As a result, dividing an LLC stake on divorce often runs in two courts with different logic, and it is sensible to build the position for both from the outset.
The other side’s lawyer usually starts by asking for interim measures, namely a ban on registering any changes concerning the stake. Marina obtained one two weeks after filing her claim.
The limitation period for former spouses is three years, but it runs not from the divorce but from the moment the person learned, or should have learned, that their right had been infringed. Sometimes the division resurfaces several years later, when the former spouse is about to sell the company.
How it ended, and what can be done in advance
Andrei and Marina reached a settlement a month before the hearing on the expert valuation. The whole stake stayed with Andrei; Marina received RUB 70 million in three tranches over eighteen months, plus a country house. The division agreement was signed before a notary, without which it would not have been valid. That is less than the RUB 87 million that followed from the expert valuation, but the parties saved a year of litigation and did not have to lay out the company’s entire financial workings in court.
Almost all of this could have been settled in advance. A prenuptial agreement may establish separate ownership for particular types of property, including future property such as stakes in companies (more on our prenuptial agreement page). A clause on what happens to a participant’s stake on divorce can also be written into the articles while the partners are on good terms and nobody is getting divorced.
If dividing an LLC stake on divorce is already on the horizon, it is better to see a lawyer before the other side hires a valuer. We handle dividing a business on divorce for either side: for an entrepreneur who wants to keep control, and for a spouse who expects the real value of the stake. A matter in which a prenuptial agreement protected an operating business is described in our case on a RUB 2 billion property division, and other analyses are collected in the Insights section. We set out the plan and the cost of the work in writing before we begin.
Frequently asked questions
Is a stake in an LLC divided if it is registered only in the husband’s name?+
Yes, if the stake was acquired during the marriage and was not received as a gift or by inheritance. It does not matter which spouse it is registered to. A prenuptial agreement may establish a different regime.
Will the former spouse become a participant in the company after the division?+
That depends on the articles of association. If they do not require the participants’ consent, the spouse can join the company. If they do and the participants refuse, or if the articles prohibit the transfer of stakes to third parties, the spouse retains the right to the actual value of the stake.
What value is used to calculate compensation for the stake?+
When the stake stays with the participant and the other spouse is awarded money, courts usually take the market value established by a court-appointed expert as at the time the case is heard. When the company pays after refusing to admit the spouse, it is the actual value, that is, the corresponding portion of the net assets.
Need an assessment of your situation?+
Leave a request: a lawyer specialising in family and corporate disputes will review the articles of association, the extract from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities and the prenuptial agreement, if there is one, and tell you what each side can realistically expect.