FICTITIOUS AGREEMENTS IN FAMILY AFFAIRS

 The topic of fictitious deals has always been one of my favorites. Such cases are very interesting and difficult. And there are such agreements in all areas of law, and family law is no exception.

 Clients often seek help to recognize an agreement as fictitious, due to the fact that it caused certain consequences that the person who made it did not expect or were violated the rights of a third party or one of the parties to the agreement.

 We have all heard about fictitious marriages, fictitious divorces, fictitious contracts. But this is not the whole list, and there are a number of others that probably not everyone has heard of:

• fictitious division of property;
• fictitious adoption;
• fictitious recognition of paternity and even fictitious recovery of alimony.

What are the reasons for concluding such agreements?

 As for marriage, it is no secret that even in Soviet times, people who got married were given coupons for the purchase of scarce goods, all sorts of benefits, vouchers to the sanatorium, housing and other benefits. Although times have changed, the relevance of such a fictitious act as marriage has not lost its relevance. Marriage helps to obtain a residence or citizenship certificate, temporary registration, to seize the property of an elderly person after his death, to receive various benefits from state or municipal services, the status of a married woman or a married man for certain purposes.

 Since the amount of alimony is affected by the presence of other dependent children, a court decision to collect alimony for another child is one of the schemes to reduce the amount of alimony. That is, the ex-husband agrees with his current civilian wife that she should go to court with a fictitious claim for child support. The purpose of such an agreement is not to receive alimony, but to have a document confirming additional payments to the person in order to further reduce the amount of alimony.

 Men of mothers of illegitimate children often decide on fictitious fatherhood. Because acknowledging the paternity of the wife's illegitimate child is a much simpler procedure than adoption.

 Unfortunately, there are also cases of fictitious adoption. They are ready to go for it in order to obtain citizenship or the same benefits and financial assistance. In order to obtain certain material benefits, fictitious guardianship, fictitious foster parenting and many other fictitious acts appear.

 However, recognizing the agreement as fictitious is a very delicate and complicated procedure.

 The difficulty of proving the fictitiousness of the agreement is the parties' non-recognition of their fictitious intentions and their mutual silence, for example, when a third party who failed to "take for debt" property that was fictitiously donated goes to court to declare the agreement invalid. Or the fictitiousness of intentions cannot be proved because of the real consequences of such fictitious agreements. After all, an important factor in recognizing the agreement as fictitious is the lack of intention to create the legal consequences stipulated by this agreement.