Business Profile: Matrimonial lawyer Sylvie Sarabia

Dec 24 2009 By Tom Fleming

The place: A luxury apartment in Barcelona. The occasion: a WAGs and footballers get-together. The entertainment: A game of Monopoly.

The participants: Sylvie Sarabia, now a Birmingham matrimonial lawyer, four friends and one Diego Maradona.

This surreal-sounding encounter took place when Sylvie was married to a Spanish footballer who played for Barcelona, as, too, did Maradona.

“It was usual on Sundays, when matches were played at home, for some of the footballers and wives and girlfriends to get together after the match,” she recalled.

“One Sunday we ended up going back to the flat that was being rented by Maradona. Some of them sometimes played poker on these occasions but that night we played Monopoly.”

So what was Maradona like to play against? And did he win – using the “Hand of God” or otherwise?

Sylvie laughed. “There was no hand of God involved, but I do remember that he won.”

As a WAG – an expression her mother coined long before it became common parlance – Sylvie’s life was very different to her life now. Although most top European footballers didn’t earn the kind of money they command today, she and her husband, Manolo Sarabia, enjoyed an exciting lifestyle.

She had met the dashing Spaniard while on holiday with friends in Lloret de Mar, aged just 18. What she imagined to be a holiday romance quickly became serious and they married.

But the relationship fell apart three years later after the death of their baby daughter in a tragic accident.

“The marriage started to go wrong and I couldn’t bear us to end up hating each other. So I decided to leave and to return to England.”

Sylvie struggled to get her life back together. “But I had a lot of friends in different parts of the country. They were brilliant – they saved me,” she said.

It was one of these friends who spotted a job advert in The Times for a chef on a narrow boat in France and encouraged Sylvie to apply.

“I wasn’t sure, but I went along to the interview anyway. There were loads of people there so I didn’t think I stood a chance, but a couple of days later they offered me a job.”

Armed with only O-Level French and no commercial cooking experience, Sylvie set off for France. It proved to be the start of her recovery.

“I did a week as a cook and a week as a cabin girl and from the beginning I really enjoyed it. I did nearly a year on the boat, which provided holidays for Americans, many of whom were celebrities in the US.” Sylvie also embarked on her first post-marriage romances. “That helped towards my recovery from my broken marriage,” she said. “I made lots of friends, too, including a Canadian girl with whom I’m still in touch.”

Sylvie’s culinary skills so impressed one of the tourists, a well known chef, that she was offered a job in a New York restaurant. Another boat guest offered her a job as a TV presenter in the US.

“In the end, though, partly because I had an English boyfriend and partly because I didn’t want to live in America, I came back to Britain.”

After trying her hand at a variety of jobs, Sylvie decided to train as a lawyer – following in her footsteps of her solicitor father.

“At school I’d wanted to be a doctor or a journalist, but I was also interested in law and in the end I opted for law.”

After qualifying, Sylvie, who was born and brought up in Worcestershire, worked in Birmingham. “I decided to specialise either in criminal or matrimonial law – I wanted to do litigation – but hearing about criminal lawyers being regularly woken up in the middle of the night to deal with clients put me off criminal law.”

A partner at the firm where she worked knew Diane Benussi, founding partner of Birmingham-based niche matrimonial practice Benussi & Co, then based in Sutton Coldfield. When a vacancy came up, Sylvie went for the job – and got it. Several years later, she is still there.

“I’d been for other jobs, but when I met Diane I had a feeling that Benussi & Co would be absolutely right for me.”

And so it proved to be. Today, Sylvie specialises in ancillary relief. Her retained knowledge of Spanish – she is still near-fluent – is also useful