Gordon Ramsay’s wife, Tana Ramsay, has a lot to say about her father. She just doesn’t have much to say to him.
“The knowledge that my father and brother had been systematically defrauding my husband was extremely distressing to me,” she told a judge about her father’s actions while working for Gordon Ramsay.
Gordon Ramsay had Tana’s father Christopher Hutcheson running his company as business manager until he fired him in 2010 for gross misconduct. Her brother Adam also worked within the company. He too was fired.
Ramsay says that Hutcheson signed a lease on a London pub and used a “ghostwriting machine”, commonly used by authors to sign hundreds of books, to affix Ramsay’s name to the lease as personal guarantor. This put Ramsay on the hook for what amounts to a million dollars a year for 25 years. Now Ramsay is suing to get out from under the lease.
Tana Ramsay says her father took advantage of Gordon’s lack of knowledge of the money side of his business. she said that Gordon told her that the lease “takes everything we have ever worked for.”
“My father was someone, in my opinion, who was very, very clever at times at giving enough information to satisfy, but never all,” she told the court. I think certainly when Gordon asked questions or sort of wanted to know things, sometimes it would be a case of my father keeping him incredibly busy or out of the country with not enough time to be told everything.”
Gordon Ramsay and Tana have been together since 1996 and have four children. Tana says those children are the only reason she ever speaks to her father now.
“I don’t really speak to my father since he left the company unless it is concerning his grandchildren,” she said. “We certainly don’t have any comfortable conversations.”