3 days ago
‘Call me Mr Tea' — The people scalded by Perthshire's great tea scandal
Picture the scene: Paris. March 14, 2015.
The great and good of the world's tea industry gather for a lavish party, a celebration of their achievements over the past 12 months.
This night at the Salon de Thé awards is a special one for Scotland, as Perthshire's own Wee Tea Plantation scores a coveted gold award.
The company's Dalreoch white tea has been crowned the best tea in the world.
The announcement sparks a media buzz.
The plantation's Tam O'Braan tells BBC Five Live presented Nicky Campbell that morning he cannot attend the ceremony as his wife is about to give birth to twins.
But he says he is sending a colleague to read out the speech he penned.
'I suppose you could call me Mr Tea after winning such a major award,' he told reporters.
Coupled with a silver gong from the Tea Exchange in London, it really is a remarkable achievement for a Scottish business – particularly one set up just over six months earlier.
Except the awards ceremony never happened.
O'Braan – known by prosecutors as Thomas Robinson – made it up to boost sales and win contracts.
The fake awards were part of a wider deception that hoodwinked not only the owners of some of the country's best known hotels but also wholesalers, journalists, landowners and businesses.
Robinson was this week convicted of an elaborate £550k fraud, taking in five-star hoteliers and genuine tea growers.
At his trial, he distanced himself from the Salon de Thé prize claiming it was gourmet tea firm Mariage Freres' award.
But he said he remembered seeing some kind of gold medallion.
'I didn't get to keep it,' he said.
'But it must have had some standing because the buyers from Fortnum and Mason wanted to display it in their store.'
Asked if the whole thing was made up, he said: 'I'm taking it on trust that the award does exist.'
The Courier was also caught up in Robinson's web of lies.
In February 2017, we reported how thieves had stolen tea leaves from his Dalreoch farm.
The report was based on information provided to us by the company, while Robinson was recovering from a heart attack we were told.
The theft was never reported to Police Scotland and it emerged during the trial the thefts may have been faked ahead of a council inspection of the land.
Here we look at just a handful of others who were caught out by Robinson's great tea blag.
In hindsight, alarm bells should have been ringing for London tea seller Alistair Rea, when Robinson – his best customer – asked him to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).
The document was purportedly a legally binding contract demanding Mr Rea's silence on all correspondence between him and Robinson.
Robinson first contacted sole-trader Mr Rea in August 2015, when his business What-Cha, selling top end tea from around the world, was starting out on eBay.
He asked how degradable his loose leaf black tea was, before putting in an order for 30kg.
He asked for it to be delivered to a PO address in Glasgow's Bath Street.
Over a period of nearly three-and-a-half years, Robinson ordered about 700kg of loose leaf tea from as far afield as China, Malawi and Sri Lanka, often at thousands of pounds a time.
He often asked about the produce and requested photos to see if they were 'leafy enough'.
Mr Rea, 36, said he had never before been asked by a customer to sign a confidentiality agreement.
'I agreed to sign it to keep the business relationship going,' he said.
The paper was sent from Robinson – not from a lawyer – in October 2015, not long after he began buying from What-Cha.
In February 2016, Robinson visited Mr Rea's business premises – a spare room at his Islington home – to pick up more tea.
Robinson explained to the tea vendor he had been out of action for a while following a heart attack and would making big orders to help catch up with customers.
Mr Rea did not know Robinson had a tea plantation but suspected he had been selling on his tea leaves.
Peter Pejacsevich, a forester and farmer who owns 680 acres of land on the banks of Loch Tummel, said his interest was piqued when reading a news article about Scottish tea plantations in 2016.
One of the people mentioned in the piece was Perthshire's Tam O'Braan whose tea, it stated, was being sold by Fortnum and Mason.
Mr Pejacsevich, 70, decided to investigate further, with the idea of growing tea plants on his own land.
By email, he contacted Robinson, who he knew only as O'Braan, before meeting up at his Amulree site.
There, he could see about 100 or so plants, about a metre high, despite Robinson's claims he had a field of tens of thousands of plants near his home.
'I can't recall if he said if these were grown on the farm but the implication was that they were grown there,' said Mr Pejacsevich.
The London-based landowner noticed Robinson had a slight limp, which he told him was 'the result of military action'.
Mr Pejacsevich struck a deal to buy 1,200 plants at £15,000.
Robinson was given a key and granted access to the farmer's land at Loch Tummel.
He told Mr Pejacsevich a group of agricultural students had been employed to harvest the leaves.
These so-called 'woofers' – a term for people who work for rural firms in exchange for bed and board – were said to have stayed at the farm with Robinson, although there was no evidence they ever existed.
Some time later, Mr Pejacsevich was shown a tea menu from the Balmoral Hotel.
It offered jasmine green tea 'grown on the banks of Loch Tummel'.
Mr Pejacsevich said there had been no other teas growing near the loch and stressed he had not given Robinson permission to sell on tea from his plantation.
In court, Robinson blamed a man called 'Billy' for looking after Mr Pejacsevich's crops.
Antiques dealer and farmer Henry Baggott was – initially at least – an enthusiastic supporter.
'It was interesting to hear someone was growing tea in Scotland and doing it so well,' he said.
'It was exciting that someone was championing this here in Scotland.'
He got in touch with Robinson – or O'Braan as he knew him – in 2015 and went to visit his farm.
There he saw a few hundred plants.
'From what I saw, they seemed to be pretty healthy but it was all new to me at that stage.'
During their talks, Robinson told Mr Baggott he had been in the army, 'in a regiment like the Paras.'
'If someone tells you they had been in the army, you believe them,' he said.
After tests on his own soil at his wife's family farm near Castle Douglas, Baggott agreed to buy 700 plants.
'Tam came with a team from the plantation.
'There was very little guidance from Tam – it was very much dig a hole, pop in a plant and away we go.
'At the time, we thought this was great.
'It was only subsequently we looked closer and could see they had been badly planted and were in poor quality. They soon started dying.'
In the first year, between 25-to-30% of the plants were lost.
After about seven years, he only managed to harvest about 100 grammes of tea.
Mr Baggott said Tam 'was a very hard man to get hold of after we initially planted his plants.'
