Latest news with #Perthshire
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Anyone for gardening? Just don't ask former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray!
Andy Murray and wife Kim have opened up about their love for gardening – although the retired tennis ace has admitted he is hopeless at it. The couple invited gardening supremo Monty Don to their luxury hotel Cromlix, in Dunblane, Perthshire, for a look and explained the work around the property has been inspired by Kim's own love for flowers and plant. But Sir Andy confessed: 'I'm definitely not green fingered and actually I don't even know what that means either. 'I'm assuming it is a gardening term that I should know.' The father-of-four left his wife in stitches with the comments but she later told Mr Don on BBC Gardners' World she aims to get him into gardening having just planted 6,000 tulips around their own estate. She added: 'He was not into art but I got him into art. 'And he noticed my tulips this year. 'Andy has more time in his hands now and he has a very curious mind so I think one day he'll get into it.' Mrs Murray said she was first invited to the Royal Chelsea Flower Show in 2013 when a hosta was named after her husband. She said: 'I was very excited to visit and I received a hosta named Andy Murray and I brought it home and I took great pride in planting it out and it got absolutely decimated by slugs really rapidly.' However, since then she has manged to oversee a kitchen garden at Cromlix which produces cut flowers for the house and ingredients for the kitchen and the bar.
Sky News
3 days ago
- Business
- Sky News
Fraudster conned luxury hotels and retailers out of £580k by selling fake Scottish tea
A man has been found guilty of fraud totalling almost £600,000 after he passed off ordinary tea as a premium product grown in Scotland. Thomas Robinson, 52, claimed the tea was a unique variety he had grown at his Perthshire estate using innovative techniques. Operating as The Wee Tea Plantation, he then fraudulently sold it to high-profile clients in the hospitality sector, including luxury hotels and retailers, between January 2014 and February 2019. Varieties listed on the website - which touted partnerships with train operator Caledonian Sleeper and the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh - include Dalreoch White, Silver Needles, Scottish Antlers Tea, and Highland Green. Also known as Tam O'Braan and Thomas O'Brien, Robinson was found to have misled genuine Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he falsely claimed were a unique, locally-grown variety. He also bolstered his credibility by fabricating academic qualifications and industry awards. An investigation by Food Standards Scotland (FSS) found Robinson's misrepresentations led to his clients losing a total of £584,783. He was found guilty of two counts of fraud by a jury at Falkirk Sheriff Court on Thursday, and is due to be sentenced at Stirling Sheriff Court on 25 June. In a statement, Ron McNaughton, head of Scottish food crime and incidents unit at FSS, said: "This was not a victimless crime - individuals, businesses, and an emerging sector of genuine Scottish tea growers suffered real financial and reputational harm as a result of deliberate deception." He then thanked a witness who came forward and added: "Fraud of this nature is often difficult to detect and even harder to prove, but we were determined to pursue every line of inquiry to build the strongest possible case."
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: Ross sauntered out, sulkier than a teenager sent to his bedroom
Russell Findlay has a way of putting questions. It's the incredulous tone, the dagger-sharp diction, the arctic stare, the shoulders that recoil like a feline catching its reflection. No matter the topic, no matter how outwardly reasonable the government's position, Findlay treats it like a monstrous crime. He could be querying climate mitigation policy and still he sounds like a desk sergeant reading a list of charges to a toerag who'd just been caught after his 17 mugging in as many days. In fact, climate mitigation policy was the very topic under discussion yesterday, and Findlay was in the highest of dudgeon. The Climate Change Committee had put out a report recommending steps to be taken so Scotland can meet Net Zero. It's the kind of report almost written for Findlay to steam about at FMQs, containing as it did proposals to turn Scotland into a high-tax, high-price, electric-motored, heat-pumped, semi-vegan dystopia. Imagine Planet of the Apes only at the end Charlton Heston finds a giant statue of Lorna Slater. Findlay fumed that, under the report's recommendations, 'the number of cattle and sheep in Scotland would need to fall by two million' in the next ten years. Culling two million sheep. There goes the SNP 's core vote. This was the point where Swinney should have said: Are you mad, man? I'm the MSP for Perthshire North. I'm hardly about to put thousands of farmers on the dole. Alas, he couldn't say that because, having signed up to the Net Zero religion, open deviation would make him a heretic. The doctrine would have to be finessed without any admission that the dogma was wrong. Or, as the First Minister put it: 'The government will consider specific proposals and bring them forward, and the parliament will have the opportunity to decide whether those proposals should be approved or not.' Ah, of course. When there's credit to be taken for climate targets, it belongs to the government. When there's a problem, it's parliament's mess to clear up. Next Findlay railed against the report's call for heat pump installations to be ramped up. He said 70 per cent of homes would need one to meet the Nationalists' eco goals, and only one per cent of houses boasted one today. And they don't come cheap: somewhere between £8,000 and £15,000. SNP ministers could cover that with their recent £20,000 bonus, but what about ordinary punters? Swinney blamed Brexit. I'm still not sure how, but he slipped it in there, as if it was a perfectly logical response, as if he didn't blame it in every answer to every question. One MSP not terribly impressed by this answer was Douglas Ross who began heckling from the cheap seats up the back of the Tory benches. Swinney began to stumble over his words, when Alison Johnstone's patience snapped like an overstretched bungee rope. The Presiding Officer gave Ross a right telling off, scolding him for having 'persistently refused to abide by our standing orders', then ordered him out of the chamber and told him not to come back for the rest of the day. He didn't move a muscle. Throats cleared awkwardly across the room. 'Mr Ross, I have asked you to leave the chamber,' Johnstone said. Still no movement. For a fleeting second or two, it looked as though things might get hairy, but after a pronounced pause, the former Tory leader picked up his parliament pass and sauntered out, sulkier than a teenager sent to his room. Johnstone seemed to think booting him out of FMQs was a sanction. If she really wanted to punish him, she should have made him sit through all 45 soul-sapping minutes. Ross was deprived of watching Nat backbencher Clare Adamson's halting attempt at reading out a question so planted it should have come with its own watering instructions. That's what they consider orderly at Holyrood, but speaking your mind, they chuck you out for that.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Guilty, conman who duped top hotels by selling fake Scots tea in £550,000 scam
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.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Man who sold ordinary tea as unique Scottish variety found guilty of fraud
A man who passed off ordinary tea as a unique, Scottish-grown variety and sold it to luxury hotels and retailers has been found guilty of fraud. Thomas Robinson, 52, claimed to have cultivated the tea at his Perthshire estate using innovative techniques, but in reality it was sourced from wholesalers outside Scotland. Operating under the business name The Wee Tea Plantation, Robinson fraudulently sold the tea to high-profile clients in the hospitality sector between January 2014 and February 2019. In addition, Robinson, who is also known as Tam O'Braan and Thomas O'Brien, misled genuine Scottish tea growers by selling them plants under the false pretence they were a unique, locally-grown variety. He also bolstered his credibility by fabricating academic qualifications and industry awards. An investigation by Food Standards Scotland (FSS) found Robinson's misrepresentations led to his clients losing a total of £584,783. Robinson was found guilty of two counts of fraud by a jury at Falkirk Sheriff Court on Thursday. Ron McNaughton, head of Scottish food crime and incidents unit at FSS, welcomed the verdict. 'This was not a victimless crime – individuals, businesses, and an emerging sector of genuine Scottish tea growers suffered real financial and reputational harm as a result of deliberate deception. 'I would like to thank the witnesses who came forward and supported the investigation – their co-operation was essential to achieving this outcome. 'It's a strong example of how partnership working and the dedication and skill of our investigative teams make it increasingly difficult for those committing food fraud to go undetected. 'We remain committed to protecting Scotland's food and drink sector from criminal activity and maintaining consumer trust.' He added that the FSS investigation had been 'highly complex and protracted', requiring co-ordination with 'partner agencies'. He continued: 'Fraud of this nature is often difficult to detect and even harder to prove, but we were determined to pursue every line of inquiry to build the strongest possible case.' Robinson is due to be sentenced at Stirling Sheriff Court on June 25.
