Pitt maintains majority ownership of Miraval…for now

Brad Pitt has gained a minor victory in his legal battle with former wife Angelina Jolie regarding the ownership of the $500m-valued Château Miraval estate in Provence.

The news has seen Pitt retain his disputed 60/40 split of the property and rosé brand, according to the New York Post.

Before they married, Pitt and Jolie bought Miraval together with the former owning 60% and the latter 40%, but when they tied the knot, Pitt gifted 10% to his partner.

The paper cited an anonymous source that said: “For now, he maintains a 60/40 (split in the estate).

“He maintains control of this until probably another year, or more.”

The issue has arisen after Pitt argued that he should have a controlling interest in the vineyard following Jolie’s sale of her shares to Russia vodka magnate Yuri Shefler, who owns Stoli.

The source also told the Post that “it’s like the equivalent of escrow (held by a third party until two parties resolve a financial arrangement)… it is not a final decision.”

Play-acting

It follows the news last summer that accused Brad Pitt of “play acting at being a winemaker” in court documents filed by Nouvel, Jolie’s former investment company, which claim that Pitt has “followed a script that may play in Hollywood, but not a court of law” in his “increasingly outrageous actions to retain control over Château Miraval”.

The papers suggested that Pitt has acted like a “petulant child” and that he and his “co-conspirators” have been engaged in a “vindictive campaign to dominate and loot the wine business that the couple had built and owned together.”

According to the filing, “Pitt’s investment company Mondo Bongo has the same 50% ownership of Château Miraval as Nouvel and that as a co-equal owner, Pitt enjoys precisely the same rights and obligations as Nouvel — nothing more, nothing less.”

Nouvel’s filing claims that Jolie offered to sell her stake in the business to Pitt and “negotiated with him for months.” But that an eleventh-hour demand for “onerous and irrelevant conditions, including provision designed to prohibit Jolie from publicly speaking about the events that had led to the breakdown of their marriage” led to Jolie selling to the Luxembourg-based Stoli instead.

Violating contract

In a court filing in the multimillion legal dollar case in 2022, Pitt suggested that his ex-wife’s decision to sell the Provencal winery to an oligarch is “violating [his] contractual rights” and claimed that she “contributed nothing” to Château Miraval.

The 400 hectare Provençal estate was the fairytale setting for the Hollywood couple’s 2014 wedding, but since 2019 it has become a battleground for the increasingly bitter divorce proceedings between the two, with each of the actors claiming the other had sought to control the asset.

At the time, the Hollywood power couple agreed to inform each other if they ever wanted to sell their shares.

The lawsuit alleges that Jolie tried to sell her shares without giving Pitt right of first refusal.