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Weirdly, it might have been done precisely to keep assets in the family in case of divorce. "Oh, sorry honey, you thought you were going to get 50% of everything? In fact I don't personally own anything, it's all family trust/business assets, so good luck with that!"
(I'd been binging a lot of dumb Youtube 'revenge stories' and a couple of these have that exact set-up: wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything into a trust/years back before they got married put everything into the business name so the house, cars, etc. are all technically business assets that they have the use of).
Local feudal lord arranges it so blood kin have the use of houses, cars, bank accounts and so forth, but if greedy spouses try to despoil them in a divorce, they end up with nothing since technically the married kids own nothing. Kids know that when Father kicks the bucket, they'll inherit, so they have no incentive to go against this arrangement. If they do end up getting divorced, they know they'll lose nothing.
It serves numerous purposes, and the divorce one is probably low on the list.
The primary justification given to family is vague "tax advantages;" which I'm not sure ultimately pay off in every case. Maneuvering who makes what money and who or what has title to which asset can be useful, but when it always comes up "daddy controls everything and you get what little he wants to give you;" well then I doubt that it's all about the tax advantages.
Knowing the family dynamics, the biggest reason was that the patriarch wanted to keep everyone enslaved to himself, totally dependent on him for their livelihoods. This extended through other family dynamics: he had numerous children, and none of them went to college, and he managed their work lives such that none of them ever built easily transferable experience. You worked for the family business until he died or you died, and as long as you worked for the family business you lived in luxury, but if you left you were out in the cold with no assets and no easy transition to another job that would pay anything like the same total compensation. He underpaid his kids for the work they did, but made up the difference by paying for their housing and cars, their vacations to family properties, company employees doing domestic labor at their homes, etc. But this in turn means being a 40 year old man with kids, and living where daddy tells you and driving the car your daddy agrees on and never going against his will.
The break up daddy was worried about was between him and his kids, not his kids and their spouses. That's just a side benefit of the arrangement.
That's clear, then.
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For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".
Yeah but they've still fundamentally got to come for the property of the divorced. They can't easily reach out to third parties
Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.
If you already own nothing and work for your (shady) dad, the available punishments are quite limited though.
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