The wife’s expert valued the husband’s company at $800,000 — rounded up, he conceded on cross, from a calculated $784,114. His written report had been excluded from evidence on the husband’s own objection, so the number rode entirely on his live testimony. He had not accounted for the company’s outstanding $500,000 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, explaining that the income method he used “did not call for considering that item.” His report was dated June 30, 2022; he testified in January 2023; closing arguments came seven months after that. The husband attacked all of it — the rounding, the loan, the vintage. What he did not do was retain a valuation expert of his own.
The Virginia Court of Appeals affirmed. In Marhoum v. Fekkak, Record No. 0643-24-4 (Va. Ct. App. Aug. 19, 2025) (unpublished mem. op.) (Raphael, J., joined by Ortiz, J., and Annunziata, S.J.), the court — reviewing the Loudoun County Circuit Court’s judgment (Fisher, J.) — held that every one of the husband’s complaints went to the weight of the expert’s opinion, not its sufficiency, and that the credibility of an expert and the weight of his testimony belong “exclusively” to the factfinder. With no contrary valuation evidence in the record, the trial court was entitled to credit the wife’s expert, and the appellate court would not reweigh him. For family law attorneys and valuation professionals, Marhoum is a case about what happens when Virginia’s distinctive intrinsic-value standard meets a one-expert record — and a reminder that what survives appellate review and what constitutes best valuation practice are not the same question.
Virginia’s Distinctive Standard
Most equitable-distribution jurisdictions value businesses at fair market value or a statutory “fair value.” Virginia stands essentially alone. Since Bosserman v. Bosserman, 9 Va. App. 1, 6 (1989), Virginia trial courts valuing marital property “must determine from the evidence that value which represents the property’s intrinsic worth” to the parties. “Intrinsic value is a very subjective concept,” Howell v. Howell, 31 Va. App. 332, 339 (2000), and “[d]etermining intrinsic value must depend on the facts of the case.” Wright v. Wright, 61 Va. App. 432, 457 (2013). The appellate court affirms “if the evidence supports the findings and if the trial court finds a reasonable evaluation based on proven methodology and on the application of it to the particular facts of the case.” Id.
The conceptual difference from fair market value is real. FMV asks what a hypothetical willing buyer would pay a hypothetical willing seller; it assumes a market, assumes a sale, and invites market-based adjustments. Intrinsic value asks what the business is worth to these parties in the context of their divorce — where there may be no established market, the owner has no intention of selling, and one spouse will keep the enterprise while the other relinquishes all future benefit. Three practical consequences follow for the valuation engagement. First, minority and marketability discounts are frequently rejected and always require standard-specific justification: a DLOM derived from restricted-stock studies measures what a buyer would demand, and Virginia’s appellate decisions have upheld trial courts that declined fractional-interest discounts under intrinsic-value review. (Commentators on Virginia divorce valuation — Mercer Capital’s Chris Mercer prominent among them — have observed that minority and marketability discounts generally have no place in most Virginia divorce valuations.) Second, the trial judge’s discretion is wide, and appellate review is deferential — “all trial court rulings come to an appellate court with a presumption of correctness,” Sobol v. Sobol, 74 Va. App. 252, 272 (2022) — so the valuation battle is won or lost at trial. Third, traditional methods (income, market, asset) remain the tools, see Patel v. Patel, 61 Va. App. 714, 723–24 (2013) (income approach), but the expert should connect the method to the intrinsic-value framework rather than mechanically importing FMV conventions.
The Record: A Buyout, a Pandemic Loan, a Recovery
The husband, El Mehdi Marhoum, co-founded Benel Solutions LLC with a business partner in December 2014, before the July 2016 marriage; the two were 50/50 owners. By 2018 the company was struggling and the partnership had soured — the husband believed his partner was undermining the business, the partner sued in September 2018, and the husband counterclaimed for $7.5m. The couple drew down savings and took on debt to finance the litigation. In December 2018, under a buyout agreement, the husband purchased the partner’s half-interest for $30,000 in marital funds, becoming sole owner. The wife, Chaimaa Fekkak, pitched in on the recovery: supporting employee morale (team lunches she cooked, employee gifts, a football watch-party), reviewing company emails, social media, and holiday cards, attending networking events, and — in her words the court credited — doing “everything for [husband] at home” to make his professional life easier. Benel recovered by the end of 2019 on the strength of a large contract. In May 2020 it received a $150,000 EIDL, later increased to $500,000, which it began repaying in November 2022 at $2,516 per month; it also received two rounds of forgiven PPP loans. Both spouses filed for divorce in 2021.
At trial, the wife’s expert, Mark Vogel, opined “to a reasonable degree of professional certainty,” based on financial statements, a general ledger, tax returns, and bank statements, that Benel’s intrinsic value was $800,000. The trial court excluded his written report on the husband’s objection; the opinion came in through testimony. Vogel described the three valuation approaches and explained his choice of the income method, noting the husband’s use of Benel as a “pass-through entity” to fund personal expenses. On cross, he acknowledged the $784,114 calculation rounded up to $800,000, and acknowledged the unconsidered $500,000 EIDL, which he said the income method did not call for considering. The husband offered no competing valuation. The trial court credited Vogel, found the husband not credible on his finances (“I just don’t believe” him; “he’s not telling the truth on a number of matters”), awarded the wife $401,503.83 payable within roughly two months, and later awarded her $141,625 in attorney fees and costs, citing the husband’s “intransigence” and “intractability.”
The Valuation Holdings: Weight, Not Sufficiency
Start with the rounding. The court of appeals held that “nothing in the record shows that it was improper” for Vogel to round up — the husband “did not offer evidence to show that rounding up was improper or otherwise violated the applicable standard of care for a valuation expert.” Note the precise structure: the court did not declare rounding immaterial as a matter of law; it held the attack failed for want of evidence. (As commentary: rounding a conclusion of value to a sensible level of precision is standard professional practice — a conclusion stated as $784,114 implies a false precision the methodology cannot support — but in Marhoum the point was never engaged on the evidence.)
The EIDL is the harder question. Vogel’s decision not to account for the $500,000 loan “did not invalidate his valuation because, as Vogel explained, the loan was irrelevant to the income method of valuation,” and the court has accepted trial-court reliance on the income approach. Patel, 61 Va. App. at 723–24. Here a valuation firm owes its readers candor: this holding is about appellate deference, not methodological endorsement. Whether a $500,000 interest-bearing obligation — roughly $30,000 a year of debt service against a $784,114 indicated value — belongs in an income-approach equity conclusion is genuinely contestable. If the debt service is reflected in the cash flows being capitalized, deducting the balance again would double-count; if it is not, a competing expert would press for the deduction or at least force the explanation under oath. The reason the exclusion survived is that no competing expert existed to press anything. The husband’s counsel argued the omission in closing; argument is not evidence; the credibility and weight of expert testimony are “exclusively in the province of the factfinder.” deCamp v. deCamp, 64 Va. App. 137, 155 (2014). The practice lesson cuts both ways: experts should address unusual items — EIDL and PPP balances, earnouts, related-party flows — head-on in testimony, because an explained exclusion reads as judgment while an unexplained one reads as oversight; and opposing parties should understand that such items are litigated with evidence or not at all.
Then the valuation date. Code § 20-107.3(A) requires the court to value distributable property “as of the date of the evidentiary hearing,” Sobol, 74 Va. App. at 274, and Vogel’s report predated trial by more than six months. But Hamad v. Hamad, 61 Va. App. 593, 608–09 (2013), holds that when only older information is available and the parties fail to provide (or proffer) different data showing the value changed, the trial court may rely on the older information — because “the burden is on the parties to provide the trial court sufficient evidence from which it can value their property,” Bosserman, 9 Va. App. at 5, and appellate courts “cannot continue to reverse and remand” where the parties had an adequate opportunity and failed to use it. Bowers v. Bowers, 4 Va. App. 610, 617 (1987). Vogel testified his opinion rested on the most recent available information and that the husband’s own trial testimony had not changed it. The husband cited Tittsworth v. Robinson, 252 Va. 151 (1996), for the proposition that assumption-laden valuations are insufficient as a matter of law — but identified no record evidence undermining Vogel. Vintage complaints, like rounding complaints, go to weight.
A $30,000 Buyout That Became the Baseline
The classification fight is where Marhoum gets structurally interesting, and where the trial court’s framework deserves careful attention. Benel began as the husband’s separate property (pre-marital co-founding). When he bought his partner’s half with $30,000 of marital funds in December 2018, the trial court held under Code § 20-107.3(A)(3)(e) that the commingling transmuted the company into entirely marital property, while crediting the husband’s retracing of his original half-interest. The court then did something every valuation professional should note: it used the arm’s-length buyout price to fix Benel’s total value at $60,000 in 2018 (two halves at $30,000 each), and under subsection (A)(3)(a) classified the increase from $60,000 to $800,000 between 2018 and 2022 as marital — yielding a marital component of $770,000 and a $30,000 separate credit.
On appeal the husband argued the court applied the wrong commingling subsection — that under (A)(3)(d), the marital half he purchased was “contributed property” that took on the character of his separate “receiving property,” making all of Benel separate. The court of appeals assumed without deciding that the trial court invoked the wrong subsection and affirmed anyway: harmless error, because the court reached the right result under (A)(3)(a). Moore v. Joe, 76 Va. App. 509, 516–17 (2023); Code § 8.01-678. Subsection (A)(3)(a) makes the increase in value of separate property during the marriage marital “to the extent that marital property or the personal efforts of either party have contributed to such increase[],” with a two-step burden: the non-owning spouse proves contributions and an increase in value; the burden then shifts to the owner to prove the increase (or some portion) was not caused by those contributions. David v. David, 64 Va. App. 216, 224 (2015).
The wife carried her burden with concrete evidence: her personal contributions to the company’s recovery and the husband’s own admission that the couple’s joint “financial suffering” — marital savings and debt poured into the partner litigation — helped resuscitate the business. The husband then carried nothing: no evidence of Benel’s value at the date of marriage, no evidence the $30,000 buyout understated the partner’s half (he introduced no settlement agreement and described no terms tying the price to litigation peace), no evidence of post-separation appreciation, and no assignment of error to the finding that he failed his burden. The court of appeals, citing the persuasive reasoning of an unpublished decision, put the point directly: if the husband contended date-of-marriage evidence would have shown a greater separate interest, “it was husband’s burden to introduce such evidence.”
Two lessons. For owner-spouses: transaction prices you generate — partner buyouts, settlements, financing events — will be repurposed as valuation evidence years later, under whatever standard of value then applies. The husband’s $30,000 buyout, struck in the shadow of litigation, became the intrinsic-value baseline for the whole company because nobody gave the court anything better; if the context mattered, the time to paper it was 2018. For non-owner spouses and their counsel: the (A)(3)(a) burden-shift is a powerful engine, and the proof that drives it can be as homely as team lunches and holiday cards — the statute counts personal effort, monetary and non-monetary, and the owner who cannot decompose the appreciation loses all of it.
The Strategic Error: No Expert, No Alternative
Every one of the husband’s valuation attacks — rounding, the EIDL, data vintage — failed for the identical reason: there was nothing on the other side of the scale. The trial court had one credible analysis and one party’s assertions, and assertions are not evidence. This is a pattern that recurs across the matrimonial-valuation case law this series has examined: the owner-spouse who believes the business is overvalued but does not retain a competing expert loses the valuation fight, and the appellate court — reviewing for abuse of discretion under a standard that commits credibility and weight to the factfinder — cannot rescue him.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A credentialed valuation of a small closely held company costs a small fraction of the spread between $800,000 and whatever the husband believed Benel was worth — and a fraction of the $141,625 in fee-shifting his litigation conduct ultimately drew. Even a competing conclusion meaningfully lower than $800,000 would have given the trial court two analyses to weigh, components to mix, and a record on which the EIDL and vintage questions could actually be engaged. Without one, there was nothing to weigh and nothing to mix. And the ability-to-pay fight followed the same script: against the husband’s claim of a $5,800 bank balance stood $360,000 of marital-home proceeds, Benel’s business checking account exceeding $900,000 as of July 2022, $83,000 of divorce fees he had run through the company credit card, and undisclosed accounts — a record that converted his hardship argument into a credibility finding against him and supported both the two-month payment schedule and the fee award.
How Intrinsic Value Changes the Engagement
The engagement implications run to four disciplines. Justify any discount against the standard, or omit it: in FMV jurisdictions, DLOM and DLOC are routine; under Virginia’s intrinsic-value standard they are frequently rejected, because the standard does not posit a hypothetical sale, and an expert importing a restricted-stock-study DLOM without addressing the standard hands opposing counsel the cross-examination. Explain the method in intrinsic-value terms: because the standard is subjective and review is deferential, credibility and clarity at trial matter more than methodological elegance on paper — and Marhoum is the proof, since the expert whose report was excluded from evidence prevailed on testimony alone, because he could explain his approach-selection (income method for a pass-through used to fund personal expenses) and stand behind his conclusion to a reasonable degree of professional certainty. Address unusual items head-on, and expect them to be tested only by evidence: EIDL and PPP balances, earnouts, related-party transactions — an explained treatment reads as professional judgment, an unexplained one reads as oversight, and as Marhoum shows, the testing instrument is a competing expert, not closing argument. And mind the valuation date and the record’s currency: the statute targets the evidentiary-hearing date, but Hamad lets older data carry the day when no one supplies newer — if the value has moved since the report, the party who benefits must prove the movement.
A Note on Precedential Weight
Marhoum is an unpublished memorandum opinion, not designated for publication under Code § 17.1-413(A). Unpublished Court of Appeals decisions are not binding precedent but may be cited as informative or persuasive, Rule 5A:1(f) — a practice the Marhoum panel itself models in relying on the persuasive reasoning of an unpublished decision for the date-of-marriage burden point. The opinion applies settled published authority — Bosserman, Howell, Wright, Hamad, Sobol, David — and its value is illustrative: a clean, recent demonstration of how Virginia’s intrinsic-value standard, deferential review, and a one-expert record interact.
The Practical Takeaway
Marhoum v. Fekkak changes nothing in Virginia law, which is precisely its usefulness. It confirms that under the intrinsic-value standard, a well-explained expert analysis credited by the trial court is functionally unreviewable on weight-based attacks; that rounding, loan-treatment, and data-vintage complaints are weight arguments requiring contrary evidence; that the (A)(3)(a) burden-shift converts marital contributions — financial and domestic — into marital appreciation unless the owner can decompose the increase; and that transaction prices created during the marriage can become the valuation baseline years later. For the owner-spouse, the case is a catalogue of unforced errors: no competing expert, no date-of-marriage evidence, no decomposition of the appreciation, and litigation conduct that drew a six-figure fee award. Failing to retain an expert isn’t a strategy. It’s a concession — and in Virginia, where the standard is subjective and the review is deferential, it is usually an irreversible one.
Authorities Cited
Marhoum v. Fekkak, Record No. 0643-24-4 (Va. Ct. App. Aug. 19, 2025) (unpublished mem. op.) (Raphael, J.), aff’g Cir. Ct. Loudoun Cnty. (Fisher, J.).
Bosserman v. Bosserman, 9 Va. App. 1 (1989); Howell v. Howell, 31 Va. App. 332 (2000); Wright v. Wright, 61 Va. App. 432 (2013); Patel v. Patel, 61 Va. App. 714 (2013).
Sobol v. Sobol, 74 Va. App. 252 (2022); Hamad v. Hamad, 61 Va. App. 593 (2013); Bowers v. Bowers, 4 Va. App. 610 (1987); Tittsworth v. Robinson, 252 Va. 151 (1996); deCamp v. deCamp, 64 Va. App. 137 (2014).
David v. David, 64 Va. App. 216 (2015); Moore v. Joe, 76 Va. App. 509 (2023); Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson v. Lake Fairfax Seven Ltd. P’ship, 253 Va. 93 (1997).
Va. Code §§ 20-107.3(A), (A)(3)(a), (A)(3)(d)–(e), (E); 8.01-678; 17.1-413(A); Va. Sup. Ct. R. 5A:1(f), 5A:30(b)(2)(C).
If you’re handling a Virginia divorce involving a closely held business and need to understand how the intrinsic-value standard affects the valuation engagement — particularly the treatment of discounts, pandemic-era debt, and valuation dates — we’re glad to discuss the approach. The standard changes what the expert should and shouldn’t do, and getting that right before trial is easier than explaining it on redirect.
