A son who repaid the kindness of the woman who adopted him by plundering her bank account of nearly £2 million was yesterday jailed for 2½ years.

Mark Hodson and his wife, Kim, lived like millionaires at their Somerset farmhouse with a £200,000 speed-boat and a £65,000 Porsche while his own business went bust, a court heard yesterday. His adoptive mother, Ruby, was unwittingly paying for this lavish lifestyle after giving him control over her financial affairs. After her death in May, executors found £1.8 million missing from the estate she was left by her husband, John Claude Hodson, a senior official with the HSBC bank.

Hodson, 39, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to ten specimen charges of theft totalling £340,000, two counts of concealing property in bankruptcy and one count of obtaining a money transfer by deception.

Donald Tait, for the prosecution, told Bristol Crown Court that Hodson, from Crewkerne, Somerset, had forged his mother’s signature on some cheques. Hodson founded a courier firm in 1999 but was declared bankrupt in 2005. He concealed the purchase of the Porsche and the Gobi powerboat from Customs and Excise. The 77-year-old widow had also paid for the couple’s £600,000 farmhouse where she lived in a granny flat.

After Ruby Hodson’s death, her son by birth, Paul Hodson, 41, brought a High Court claim against Mark and Kim. He was awarded £900,000 compensation but had to spend £500,000 in legal costs. Ian Stern, for Hodson, said that his client had lived in the shadow of a successful father and brother and was “not an individual of a malicious and greedy nature”.

Kim Hodson, 35, who works in a hairdresser’s, was ordered to do 120 hours’ unpaid work after admitting mortgage fraud. Judge Julian Lambert described the pair’s actions as a “gross breach of trust”. After the hearing, Paul Hodson said: “I’m not at all pleased. That is no justice.”

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