Thomas Robinson supplied Edinburgh’s Balmoral and other big hotels with “authentically Scottish” single-estate tea.
Tea grower Tam O’Braan, Dalreoch Farm, Amulree, Perthshire.
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.
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.
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”.
Tea grown at Dalreach Farm, Amulree Perthshire ready to brew
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.
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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.”