Conman who made £550,000 selling fake Scottish tea to return to court

A conman who made £550,000 after selling fake ‘Scottish-grown tea’ has been ordered to return to court to face a proceeds of crime action.

Thomas Robinson, 55, also known as Thomas O’Brien or “Tam O’Braan”, was jailed for three and a half years in June after he was found guilty by a jury of carrying out a fraud involving “significant, determined and sometimes complex planning”.

Trading as “The Wee Tea Plantation”, he ordered tea plants from Garden Gifts Nursery in Sussex and planted them in the garden of a rented former sheep farm near Loch Tay.

There, he showed them to buyers from upper-class outlets, including Fortnum & Mason.

He claimed to have found a way to make his tea flourish despite the Scottish weather, using a “special biodegradable polymer” – which prosecutors said resembled a black bin liner.

He claimed he had given a presentation on his methods to the Royal Horticultural Society, and began supplying Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel with what he described as authentically Scottish single-estate tea.

He claimed he’d been told that the tea he supplied to London’s five-star Dorchester Hotel was “the [late] Queen’s favourite”.

Jurors heard that he had bought over a tonne of tea grown abroad, repacked it and sold it on.

He disguised what he was doing by getting the foreign tea delivered to a mailbox address in Glasgow and paying for it through a private bank account separate from his business account.

Prosecutors said a kilo of African tea could be sold for 100 times its cost if passed as grown in Scotland.

Robinson, a father of four, of Amulree, Perthshire, denied the crime, claiming that paperwork he could have used in his defence had been destroyed in a flood and his electronic records wiped.

A preliminary hearing in an action by the Crown under the Proceeds of Crime Act to assess and confiscate his gains was held at Stirling Sheriff Court on Wednesday.

Robinson appeared at the hearing by video link from prison.

Solicitor Ross Jenkins, for Robinson, said the defence had instructed a forensic accountant and was awaiting the disclosure of documentation by the Crown.

Sheriff Euan Gosney ordered that an evidential hearing in the case should be heard on May 11, following a pre-proof hearing on March 10.