A conman who bought tea from around the world and sold it on as Scottish has been jailed after being found guilty of a fraud totalling more than half a million pounds.
Thomas Robinson, 55, also known as Thomas O’Brien or Tam O’Braan, rented land on a former sheep farm near Loch Tay and began supplying Edinburgh’s top Balmoral Hotel with what he described as authentically Scottish single-estate tea.
He claimed he’d been told that tea he had supplied to London’s five-star Dorchester Hotel was “the Queen’s favourite”.
STV NewsA court heard he bought tea plants from a nursery in Sussex called “Plants4Presents” and installed them for show in a former kitchen garden at the property, Dalreoch Farm, Amulree, Perthshire shortly before an expected visit from buyer acting for top peoples’ foodstore Fortnum and Mason’s.
He said he had found a way to make his tea grow in half the usual time – using a “special biodegradable polymer” which the prosecution said looked like black bin liner – and claimed to have given a presentation on his methods to the Royal Horticultural Society.
The tea menu at the Balmoral’s Palm Court, based on descriptions Robinson gave them, boasted “Our Scottish grown teas come from gardens in our farming heartlands in Perthshire and Dumfries and Galloway”.
They had names like Dalreoch White, Silver Needles, Scottish Antlers Tea, and Highland Green.
STV News‘The CV of a fantasist’
Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, Robinson spun customers what Falkirk Sheriff Court heard were “elaborate lies” that he’d sold tea to Kensington Palace, played rugby for Blackheath, was a multi-millionaire, a landowner, a polymer scientist, had invented the “Bag For Life”, had served in the British Army in bomb disposal, had worked for the Obama administration in America on a maize project, had studied botany at Edinburgh University, and that his wife was a solicitor.
Prosecutors described this as “the CV of a fantasist”.
He also sowed success stories in the press and appeared on a BBC podcast, telling presenter Mark Stephen he’d learned to force tea plants “like rhubarb under a sink” by restricting UV light. An expert said this would actually kill them.
The court was told he secured deals to supply single-estate Scottish-grown tea products from his own plants and other tea gardens in Scotland to France’s oldest tea house Mariage Frères, as well as the Balmoral, The Dorchester, Fortnum and Mason and a Dunfermline-based firm called The Wee Tea Company, of which he had briefly been appointed a director before resigning as a result of what he called a “schism” with the owners.
The court heard Robinson bought over a tonne of tea grown abroad, repacked it, and sold it on.
He disguised what he was doing by getting the foreign leaf delivered to a mailbox address in Glasgow registered to a company called “Thomas James Consultants”, and paying though a joint personal bank account, not the Wee Tea Plantation business account.
One expert said a kilo of top tea from Africa could be sold for 100 times its cost if passed as grown in Scotland.
Robinson also claimed to have produced tea plants at Amulree from cuttings and seed.
Between 2015 and 2018 he supplied 22,000 plants to a dozen other growers in Scotland and one in Jersey at £12.50 each.
The jury heard that over the same period he was actually importing tea plants at three euros each from a horticulturalist in Italy.
He either passed them off as Scottish-grown or allowed his customers to assume they were.
Many died or did not thrive, and yields were a fraction of what Robinson had given his customers to expect.
One grower, an antique dealer, who bought thousands of plants for his wife’s family farm near Castle Douglas, said Robinson had told him he could expect to be picking his first tea at the end of a year, and could eventually expect a yield of 100 kilos of top tea plus 450 kilos of secondary leaf for blends.
After battling for seven years, they finally managed to harvest just 100 grammes of finished tea.
Robinson claimed that with the exception of 15,000 plants sold to a grower in Jersey, all the Italian plants had been in Scottish ground for a period and that made them Scottish.
The scam began to unravel early in 2017 after Perth and Kinross Council started to check up on whether Robinson had a food processing licence; then he received a visit from a Scottish Government advisor about plant passports.
He told the advisor the only plants he had were for his own use, then, in what the Crown said was an attempted cover-up, he sent out a story to the local press claiming thousands of his plants had been stolen.
The Food Crime and Incidents Unit of Food Standards Scotland was called in, and an investigation was launched, headed by a retired police inspector.
Prosecutor Joanne Ritchie said Robinson had formed “a scheme to deceive and make money on the basis of lies”.
She said: “When you look at what he was actually doing, the suggestion that this was genuine Scottish tea or these were Scottish-grown plants is almost laughable.
“He lied to every single witness who encountered him, but more than that he lied to the population at large, to the people who had been buying this tea on the understanding it was Scottish.”
After a three and a half week trial, involving thousands of pages of documentation, jurors took six hours to find Robinson, of Amulree, guilty of defrauding the tea growers of £274,354 and the hotels and tea companies of £278,634 – a total of nearly £553,000 – between January 1, 2014 and 28 Feb 2019. The verdict was unanimous, and with no deletions to any of the charges.
Robinson denied the crimes, claiming that paperwork he could have used in his defence had been destroyed in a flood and his electronic records had been lost because his storage had been turned off.
He insisted he had done no wrong and was “proud” of his work.
He told the jury: “I wanted to leave something that would stand in the history of tea.”
He shook his head when the verdicts were announced.
Sheriff Keith O’Mahony deferred sentence for reports until June 25 and remanded Robinson in custody.
He warned him: “There will be significant sentencing consequences for you.”
Advocate Colin Neilson, defending, reserved mitigation.
Robinson will also face proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
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