Fraudster made £550,000 selling fake 'Scottish-grown tea'
A fraudster who tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying "Scottish-grown tea" that was grown abroad has been found guilty of a £550,000 scam.Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh's Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London with varieties with names like Dalreoch White, Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea.Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, he claimed they had been grown on farmland in Perthshire.Instead, the tea had been imported, repackaged and then resold at hugely-inflated prices, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told.
Robinson also defrauded genuine aspiring Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he claimed were grown in Scotland.
The 55-year-old, who is also known as Thomas O'Brien or Tam O' Braan, rented a former sheep farm near Loch Tay and began spinning "elaborate lies" to customers. Prosecutors said he created the "CV of a fantasist" - claiming among other things that he was a multi-millionaire, a polymer scientist, a former bomb disposal expert and had invented the "bag for life". He also claimed to have developed a "special biodegradable polymer" that would make the tea plants grow in half the usual time. The court was told it looked like a black bin liner. Robinson's false claim that "our Scottish grown teas come from gardens in our farming heartland in Perthshire and Dumfries and Galloway" was reprinted on the Balmoral Hotel's Palm Court luxury tea menu. He boasted that tea he had supplied to London's Dorchester Hotel was "the Queen's favourite". The media was also taken in with numerous stories appearing, including on the BBC News website and in a BBC podcast.
The court heard that in reality Robinson had bought over a tonne of tea grown abroad and had it delivered to mailbox address in Glasgow, using a different company name to cover his tracks.One expert said a kilo of top tea from Africa could be sold for 100 times its cost if passed off as Scottish. Robinson claimed his tea plants had been grown from cuttings and seeds at Dalreoch Farm, at Amulree in Perthshire. When a buyer from the prestigious food store Fortnum and Mason's wanted to visit he hurriedly bought in plants from a nursery in Sussex and put them on show.Between 2015 and 2016 he conned a dozen genuine tea growers in Scotland and one from Jersey by supplying them with 22,000 plants at £12.50 each. The court heard he had actually imported them from a horticulturist in Italy at three Euros each. Many of these plants died or failed the thrive. One grower from Dumfries and Galloway was told he could expect to harvest his first tea after year and enjoy a yield of 100kg of top tea as well as £450kg of secondary leaf for blends. After battling for seven years, the grower was only able to harvest 100g of finished tea.
Food standards probe
The scam began to unravel in 2017 after Perth and Kinross Council started to check if he had a food processing licence. Eventually the food crime unit at Food Standards Scotland was called in and an investigation launched, headed up by a retired police inspector.Robinson denied the charges and claimed paperwork that would have proved his innocence had been destroyed in a flood. He said he was proud of his work and told the jurors: "I wanted to leave something that would stand in the history of tea."After a three-week trial jurors took six hours to find him guilty of defrauding tea growers, hotels and tea companies of nearly £553,000 in total. He will be sentenced at a later date, and also faces proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
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