Hi everyone

[quickwillow]

We didn't go down the annulment route, we opted for presumptive death instead because it's much faster and much cheaper than annulment. My wife's was all done and dusted in about 7 months and cost about £1200, plus 2 or 3 additional payments of about P5000 that her attorney dreamed up along the way.

Even when the whole legal process was complete, we still had to pay another bung, about P2,500, to get the clerk of the court to release the papers.

As far as kids are concerned, I don't think that they or their custody plays any part in a Philippines annulment.

Iain.

The first Attn. had £700 for filing the case arranging and paying for the psychology report and the newspaper adds for 3 weeks and 1 or 2 more appearances in court. We were then said to wait for another court date, which never happened. The second Attn. has manage to sort everything out, I must say quite quickly for £550, but still don’t actually have the papers. I’m sure like you there will be more charges before they are in our hands. Although the time scale has been longer than yours, part of this I believe is a 6-month cooling off period from filing the case to proceeding, which from my understanding is to give the couple time to change there mind. When I first started looking into this I was told about £ 1800 and if I was lucky about 9-12 months. It has taken 14 months for the decision, and we are now playing a waiting game for the papers until the 12 May.

[IainBusby]

The first Attn. had £700 for filing the case arranging and paying for the psychology report and the newspaper adds for 3 weeks and 1 or 2 more appearances in court. We were then said to wait for another court date, which never happened. The second Attn. has manage to sort everything out, I must say quite quickly for £550, but still don’t actually have the papers. I’m sure like you there will be more charges before they are in our hands. Although the time scale has been longer than yours, part of this I believe is a 6-month cooling off period from filing the case to proceeding, which from my understanding is to give the couple time to change there mind. When I first started looking into this I was told about £ 1800 and if I was lucky about 9-12 months. It has taken 14 months for the decision, and we are now playing a waiting game for the papers until the 12 May.

Hi Mark,
I'm not saying that your situation will be the same as ours, but when we went through this sort of thing, at this stage the attorney was the main problem, saying that the judge is not happy to release the papers yet and he thinks there maybe other procedures to go through etc, bull. He kept on saying that he would try to see the judge and see if he could sort it out, while we played our part by stupidly increasing the amount we were prepared to pay. After a while we got p off with this, so my wife started going to the courthouse every day and hassling the clerk of the court directly about it.

It is usual for the clerk of the court to accept the bribes on behalf of the judge, with a cut for himself of course, so the judge doesn't have to get openly involved. The problem with the attorney's is that at this stage, they want to be the ones who are doing the negotiating as this is the only way they can insure that they will get a big cut of however much they can squeeze out of you to get it completed.

As I said, in the end my wife started to go directly to the courthouse and eventually managed to get the papers released after about a week of hassling the clerk of the court..... and of course, paying the bung, which was no where near as much as the sort of figures the attorney was suggesting we might have to pay.
Iain.