Latest news with #WeeTeaPlantation
The Courier
2 days ago
- Business
- The Courier
‘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.'
Sky News
4 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 Record
4 days ago
- Daily Record
Scottish Del Boy's tea scam conned luxury clients out of £550k
Thomas Robinson supplied Edinburgh's Balmoral and other big hotels with 'authentically Scottish' single-estate tea. A conman was behind bars last night for a £550,000 fraud in which he sold luxury 'Scottish-grown' tea to posh hotels – that he'd bought from overseas. Thomas Robinson supplied Edinburgh's Balmoral and other big hotels with 'authentically Scottish' single-estate tea from his Wee Tea Plantation. The chancer even claimed tea he supplied to five-star The Dorchester in London was 'the Queen's favourite'. The reality was not unlike Del Boy Trotter's Peck-ham Spring scam in the TV comedy Only Fools and Horses, where Del fills bottles with water from his kitchen tap to sell on – at a considerable profit. Robinson, 55, rented a former sheep farm in Perthshire where he planted tea plants for show then imported more than a ton of tea from overseas and repacked it. One expert said a kilo of quality tea from Africa could be sold for 100 times what it cost if it was passed off as being grown in Scotland. The scale of Robinson's lies was laid bare in a three-and-a-half-week long case at Falkirk Sheriff Court. He was found guilty of defrauding tea growers of £274,354 and the hotels and tea companies of £278,634 – a total of nearly £553,000 – between January 2014 and February 2019. Robinson denied the crimes, claiming paperwork for his defence had been destroyed in a flood and his electronic records had been lost. The conman, also known as Tom O'Braan, bought tea plants from a nursery in Sussex called Plants4Presents. He carried out his scam by showing tea plants to buyers such as those acting for Fortnum and Mason of London, where the wealthiest in society like to shop. Other victims who bought the Wee Tea Plantation's supposedly single-estate Scottish-grown tea products included France's oldest tea house, Mariage Frères. He claimed to have found a way of making his tea grow in half the usual time at the former kitchen garden at Dalreoch Farm, at Amulree in Perthshire, using a 'special biodegradable poly-mer' which the prosecution said looked like a black bin liner. He claimed to have given a presentation on his methods to the Royal Horticultural Society. The tea menu at the Balmoral Hotel'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.' The teas had names including Dalreoch White, Silver Needles, Scottish Antlers Tea, and Highland Green. Robinson spun customers lies that his company had sold tea to Kensington Palace and that he was a former rugby star and multi-millionaire. He also claimed to be a polymer scientist, had invented the 'Bag For Life', served in the Army in bomb dis-posal and worked for ex-US president Barack Obama's administration on a maize project. Prosecutors described this as 'the CV of a fantasist'. The court heard Robinson disguised that he was repackaging foreign tea and selling it on by getting it delivered to a mailbox address in Glasgow registered to a company called 'Thomas James Consultants'. He also paid through a joint personal bank account, not the business account of The Wee Tea Plantation. Robinson managed to sow success stories in the Press. He appeared on a BBC podcast, telling presenter Mark Stephen he had learned to quickly grow tea plants by restricting UV light. An expert later said this would kill them. Robinson also claimed to have produced tea plants at his farm 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 period he was actually importing tea plants at €3 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's customers expected. One grower, Henry Baggott, 45, 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. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. He promised an eventual yield of 100 kilos (220lb) of top-quality tea plus 450kg (992lb) of secondary leaf for blends. After battling for seven years, the Baggotts finally managed to harvest just 100g (less than 4oz) 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 in 2017 after Perth and Kinross Council tried to locate Robinson's food processing licence. When a Scottish Government adviser asked about plant passports, he insisted all the plants were for his own use, then tried to cover up by sending a story to the local Press claiming thousands of his plants had been stolen. Prosecutor Joanne Ritchie said Robinson 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.' Robinson, of Amulree, Perthshire, insisted he had done no wrong. 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 told him: 'There will be significant sentencing consequences for you.'
Daily Mail
4 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
4 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.
