A Russian oil trader has lost an inter-continental family court fight over a two-year-old child with his estranged English wife.

He said she had wrongly taken their son from his home in Switzerland to England during the summer of 2017 after their marriage ran into difficulties.

But a judge in London has refused to order the woman to return the boy to Switzerland.

Mrs Justice Gwynneth Knowles concluded that the youngster was “habitually resident” in the legal jurisdiction of England and Wales.

She had analysed the case at a private hearing in the Family Division of the High Court.

Detail has emerged in a ruling published by the judge.

She has not identified the family.

The judge said the man was 35 and from Moscow. The woman was 30 and came from Redhill, Surrey, and had met her husband when working for the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

They had married in Scotland nearly three years ago.

She said the man’s family owned a “collection of properties” in Europe.

Mrs Justice Knowles said the marriage had come “under some strain” after the woman complained about her husband’s “drug and alcohol abuse”.