Guilty, conman who duped top hotels by selling fake Scots tea in £550,000 scam

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

A conman who bought tea from round the world and sold on it as Scottish is behind bars after being found guilty of a fraud totaling 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'.
A court heard he bought tea plants from a nursery in Sussex and installed them for show in a former kitchen garden at Dalreoch Farm, Amulree, Perthshire, shortly before an expected visit from buyer acting for 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'.
Falkirk Sheriff Court heard he spun elaborate tales to customers while trading as 'The Wee Tea Plantation' in what the prosecution described as the 'CV of a fantasist'.
He secured deals to supply his 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.
But the court heard Robinson bought over a tonne of tea grown abroad, repacked it, and sold it on.
He had the foreign leaf delivered to a mailbox address in Glasgow and paid for it from a joint personal bank account, not his 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 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 led his customers to expect.
One grower bought thousands of plants to plant near Castle Douglas but gave up seven years later after a meagre harvest of just 100g 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.
As the authorities started to close-in, he spun a story 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 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 end of February 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 telling 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 25th 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.