Chris Hutcheson conspired with two sons to steal information about the celebrity chef in a spat judge described as “dirty linen being aired in public”. Gordon Ramsay’s father-in-law has been jailed for six months for hacking company computers to steal information during a high-profile dispute with the celebrity chef.
Chris Hutcheson, 69 – the father of Ramsay’s wife, Tana – plotted with his sons Adam Hutcheson, 47, and Chris Hutcheson Jr, 37, to infiltrate the restaurateur’s emails and find financial details and other information, some of which ended up in the now defunct News of the World. The two younger men were both given four-month prison sentences, suspended for two years.
Jailing Hutcheson Sr at the Old Bailey, Judge John Bevan QC said: “The whole episode of five months amounts to an unattractive and unedifying example of dirty linen being washed in public.” Hutcheson Sr was involved in a public falling out with the chef, some of which was aired in legal hearings at the high court.
Having been sacked from his role as chief executive of Gordon Ramsay Holdings Ltd, he conspired with his sons, who both had IT roles in the business, to access company systems almost 2,000 times between 23 October 2010 and 31 March 2011. This included accessing information regarding Ramsay’s intellectual property rights and other material that might give them the upper hand in their legal spat. On one day in February 2011, the court heard, Hutcheson Sr accessed the system 600 times, while Adam Hutcheson accessed it 282 times.
Stories about a hair transplant and a fishing trip later appeared in the newspapers, the court heard. After their actions were discovered, Hutcheson Sr told his son Chris in an email: “Guess we have been rumbled. Bit late though.” Prosecutor Julian Christopher QC told the court that after the civil case ended the families were reconciled and as a result neither Gordon nor Tana supported the criminal prosecution. Neither was in court on Wednesday. Hutcheson Sr kissed his sons as he was taken away to begin his sentence.
The judge said that despite the seven-figure impact of the civil legal battle between the older man and his famous son-in-law, only immediate imprisonment was appropriate given the seriousness of his crime. Hutcheson Sr, of Earlsfield, south-west London, Hutcheson Jr, from Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, and Adam Hutcheson, from Sevenoaks, Kent, admitted conspiring to cause a computer to access programs and data without authority at a hearing in April.
