Tea grower Tam O’Braan, Dalreoch Farm, Amulree, Perthshire. (Image: Supplied)
Thomas Robinson duped establishments like Edinburgh’s elite Balmoral and other big hotels by hawking “authentically Scottish” single-estate tea from his so-called Wee Tea Plantation.
He even brazenly claimed that the tea he supplied to London’s prestigious five-star Dorchester was “the Queen’s favourite”.
The escapade bore a striking resemblance to Del Boy Trotter’s infamous Peckham Spring water ruse from the beloved television series Only Fools and Horses, where he filled bottles with tap water and sold them at outrageous markups.
Robinson, aged 55, leased a former sheep farm in Perthshire where he put tea plants on display but then sneakily brought in over a tonne of foreign tea which he repackaged as local produce.
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 convicted for conning tea growers out of £274,354, and the hotels and tea firms of £278,634 – totalling a staggering £553,000 fraud from January 2014 through February 2019.
Robinson refuted the allegations, insisting that critical documents for his defence were destroyed in a flood while his digital records also conveniently vanished. Known to some as Tom O’Braan, the shyster sourced his sham tea bushes from a Sussex nursery called Plants4Presents.
The conman duped buyers, including those from Fortnum and Mason of London, a favourite shopping destination for the affluent, by showcasing tea plants.
Other victims who fell for the Wee Tea Plantation’s supposedly single-estate Scottish-grown tea products included France’s oldest tea house, Mariage Frères.
He asserted that he had discovered a method to grow his tea in half the usual time at the former kitchen garden at Dalreoch Farm, in Perthshire, using a “special biodegradable poly-mer” which the prosecution likened to a black bin liner.
He claimed to have presented his methods to the Royal Horticultural Society.
The Balmoral Hotel’s Palm Court tea menu, based on descriptions provided by Robinson, 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 tales to customers claiming 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, the inventor of the “Bag For Life”, a veteran of the Army’s bomb disposal unit and a former employee of ex-US president Barack Obama’s administration on a maize project. Prosecutors dismissed these claims as “the CV of a fantasist”.
Tea grown at Dalreach Farm, Amulree Perthshire ready to brew (Image: Supplied)
The court heard Robinson cunningly masked his scheme of repackaging foreign tea and flogging it as homegrown by using a mailbox address in Glasgow under the guise of “Thomas James Consultants”. He also funnelled payments through a personal joint account rather than The Wee Tea Plantation’s business account.
Robinson even featured on a BBC podcast where he boasted to host Mark Stephen about his innovative method of accelerating tea plant growth by limiting UV light – a technique an expert later dismissed as lethal to the plants. Furthermore, Robinson claimed he cultivated tea plants at his farm from cuttings and seeds.
From 2015 to 2018, he sold 22,000 plants to various Scottish growers and one in Jersey, charging £12.50 per plant, while secretly importing them for €3 each from an Italian horticulturist. He either directly deceived buyers into believing the plants were Scottish-grown or let them make that assumption.
Unfortunately, many of these plants failed to survive or flourish, with yields significantly lower than what his clients had hoped for.
One such client, Henry Baggott, a 45 year old antique dealer, invested in thousands of plants for his wife’s family farm near Castle Douglas. Baggott recounted how Robinson had assured him of harvesting his first tea within a year.
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.
Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London (Image: Supplied)
The swindle started to come apart at the seams in 2017 when local officials couldn’t track down this rogue planter’s food processing documentation. He further blundered by trying to spin a yarn to the press about thousands of his plants being pinched after an enquiry from a Scottish Government adviser exposed gaps in his paperwork.
Prosecutor Joanne Ritchie said Robinson formed “a scheme to deceive and make money on the basis of lies.
“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.”
She didn’t pull any punches, highlighting the deceitful nature of the scheme: “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.”
The accused maintained his innocence throughout, telling the jury: “I wanted to leave something that would stand in the history of tea.”
He shook his head as the verdicts were read out. Sheriff Keith O’Mahony postponed sentencing until 25 June and held Robinson in custody.
He warned him: “There will be significant sentencing consequences for you.”
